South Africa in the ‘50s--a Novelist Looks Back : Expatriate Scores Critical Success With Book on Durban Theatrical Family

When she told people she came from South Africa, novelist Lynn Freed says that until quite recently they would reply, “ ‘Oh? Where is that?’ South Africa was a non-country, except in intellectual circles.”

No more, of course. To be white and South African provokes an instant response even in those who still can’t quite finger its location on a map.

It is not that they are hostile. By and large, Freed said, “people give me the benefit of the doubt I don’t want.” But she is asked to answer for “all sorts of things I am not an expert on.”

‘Too Complex an Issue’

The role of authority is one she resists. “I will not say I know better,” she said. “I am not interested in converting people. It is too complex an issue, and I don’t have a mission.”

The role of stranger, however, suits Freed. “I quite enjoy my displacement from everywhere,” she said. “In England, I am considered an uncultured South African, or a brash American--or both.” In South Africa, where she visits every year, she is suspect too. “South Africans harangue you from the moment you get off the plane,” she said. “They believe the world doesn’t understand them.”

Freed, 41, has lived in this country almost half her life, and is an American citizen. She was 21 when she left South Africa to do graduate work in New York, and said “I didn’t really think about whether I was leaving forever.” She wanted to continue her education, and besides, the man she was to marry was already in this country.

Looking back, she sees South Africa as “a terrific, ghastly place. I can see that if I had had more imagination, or conceivably less imagination, I could have stayed and done something.” At the time, though, she said she was a part of the whole “depart” mentality. South Africa was “an outpost, a place bright students left.”

In any event, as a writer, she believes that her function is “to expose things,” not reform them. “The right perspective for me is to look straight at it, and see the funniness,” she said.

She has written a novel, “Home Ground” (Summit, $15.95) about growing up in a Jewish theatrical family in Durban in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Although her parents were actors, Freed says the Frank family of the novel parallels but does not duplicate her own. “I draw on my life and transmute it. The orderliness is what changes things.”

Critics were impressed by her use of metaphor, particularly her use of the theatrical family to parallel the South African drama. But Freed said wryly, “I didn’t even realize it was metaphoric, and God knows I spent enough time teaching that sort of thing.” What she wanted to show, Freed said, was “a lack of awareness I was determined to observe.

‘The Big Divide’

“My point was not to whitewash it. People like to hear that Jews are more liberal; they are indeed. But on the other hand, they are members of the establishment.” Durban is an English city, and Freed said that when she was growing up, “the big divide was between English speakers and Afrikaners, not English and Jews. We were taught to look down on them. I find that now a great nerve.”

Hers was “a family considered to be affluent. They lived grandly, but didn’t have a lot of money, and they didn’t pretend they did,” Freed said.

It was a time of innocence, or at least a lack of awareness, with a pervasive “that’s the way things are” mentality about race relations. But even then, Freed said, there was “an anxiety of white children, especially in liberal families, looking in on these miserable lives of black servants who lived in the back yard, an anxiety of not being able to do anything.

“I would do small things, like give away my clothes, which is not doing anything.”

She said her parents “combined this nutty Victorian attitude towards raising children with conventional Jewish attitudes in the way we were brought up. And on the other hand, their friends were largely people in the arts.”

At a time when most South African Jewish girls were sent to government or to parochial Jewish schools, Freed went to an English girls’ school because it was “the best school in town”--this despite her father’s ambivalence about his own English education. “He had gone to boarding school in England when he was 13, and then to Cambridge. He learned to box, and did all the cliches,” his daughter said. “If I really wanted to depress him, I said I wanted to go to boarding school.”

Her mother, on the other hand, valued female beauty and “people who would go for something one hundred percent.” Freed did not see herself as qualifying by either standard, but believes that in any event “middle-class childhoods are fairly miserable. There is the ghastly yawning future, not knowing where you are going to be, especially for girls.”

Freed got a B.A. degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and then left South Africa for New York to do graduate work in English literature at Columbia University. There she married a South African physician, had a daughter, and lived in Boston, New York and Montreal before moving to San Francisco, where she finished her Ph.D. and taught at San Francisco State.

What she really wanted to do, though, was write fiction, and in 1977 she quit teaching and began writing every day at the kitchen table, first short stories and then a novel. “At the beginning it was almost a closet activity,” she said. Now Freed, who is divorced, works in a little studio, not all that much bigger than a closet, at the back of the house where she lives with her 16-year-old daughter, Jessica.

When Freed returned to South Africa last summer to promote “Home Ground,” she was greeted with sensational headlines. One article, under a headline “Sex With the Servants” splashed across five columns, suggested that “it is expected there will be calls for it (‘Home Ground’) to be banned.” It was not, although Freed herself was banned from radio and TV.

Her parents and sisters, whom she had been afraid would be offended by the book, in fact “loved it, but everybody else was put out,” Freed said. “Very little has been written about middle-class South Africans,” and they were “just horrified.”

She had not anticipated such vociferous antagonism and said “I was stunned by my own stupidity. I felt like Galileo in front of the Flat Earth Society. I was considered a traitor, and this by people who are highly critical of the government.”

Despite, or perhaps because of the boycotts, bans and brouhaha, the novel had “a wild financial success,” Freed said. But she described her visit as “four weeks of real hell,” adding “I like to be a maverick. I don’t like to be a pariah.”

Freed said she thinks about Africa a lot, and was homesick for years. But although she could imagine herself in a country life there for a while, she “could never go back and live in a middle-class house in a middle-class neighborhood and live the good life. I couldn’t go back (to live), things being the way they are.”

She said that “South Africans are passionate about their country, in a way few others are. It is so magnificent, it has a special feeling. There is great beauty, great accessibility--but only to whites. You have the feeling you own the place, and you do.

“Growing up in an elitist society you are liberated from the kinds of constraints you would have here.”

In the past, South Africans were less circumspect in their speech because they were not aware of its implications, Freed said. Today, the white middle class is “more affluent, more sophisticated in how they use their phrases,” she said. “People are now mouthing the correct terminology; now there are things that are only whispered around the bridge table. But they still make ghastly disparaging remarks about blacks when they think they are safe.

“The fact is nothing seems to have changed, except for the obvious panic.”

There are, of course, shades of opinion among white South Africans. “A lot of people would give up a huge amount to make South Africa livable for whites and presumably for everyone else, presumably because they see the end,” Freed said.

“Then there are the benign ones, who then are outraged when blacks strike, and the activist ones who really are concerned and come up against the wall of understandable black resentment and hostility.”

Many people who were quite complacent 10 years ago, “now are looking for some place to live in America,” she says. Many have already emigrated.

“As things heated up, people panicked, especially people less rooted there, who don’t have endless generations in South Africa. A lot of business and professional people left.”

Freed does not claim any special insight into the future of South Africa but expects “extended civil war” rather than either imminent revolution or things “dying down in some way.” South Africa, she fears, will become a place where whites endure a life with ever more burglar alarm systems, guards and guard dogs, “a place that is intolerable to live in. I see that as more likely than revolution.”

Friends in South Africa who love the country and want to remain say now the chances are they may not be able to live out their lives there, Freed said. But she adds, “I heard that as a child too.

“I don’t truly know,” she acknowledged. “There are layers and layers. I always have this feeling that what you hear is not really what is happening.”