NONFICTION - Sept. 17, 1995

WRITING AND BEING by Nadine Gordimer (Harvard: $18.95; 145 pp.) “I think I have been fortunate,” writes Gordimer, “in that I was born into the decadence of the colonial period.” This is post-April, 1994, South Africa, and Gordimer has for years struggled with the question of whether she could call South Africa her country if she was not allowed to call its people her people. “I am a small matter, but for myself there is something immediate, extraordinary, of strong personal meaning. That other world that was the world is no longer the world. My country is the world, a whole, a synthesis. I am no longer a colonial. I may now speak of ‘my people.’ ” And so this book of essays has the spirit of tension broken. The split in the society she grew up in, the paranoia on both sides, meant that Gordimer grew up in a world that looked to another world: England. She writes, in her last essay in this collection (and the most overtly autobiographical--”I shall never write an autobiography--I’m much too jealous of my privacy”) about having to “make herself,” without a world, against the inertia of everyday life: “One cannot exaggerate sufficiently the tendency of human beings to keep sipping the daily syrup of life in a cozy enclave.” The rest of these essays are about other authors: Amos Oz, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, Carl Niehaus and Ronnie Kasrils. But through them, Gordimer tries to describe “how we [writers] think we create.”