Anew Viking anthology commemorates Nadine Gordimer’s 75th birthday. She spoke to Peter Godwin
With the tentative tread of the dancer she once wanted to be, Nadine Gordimer steps noiselessly down the stairs from her afternoon nap. Dressed in black, she sits, taut as a sparrow, elbows on knees, chin on fists. She is quick to grin, but impatience, irritation even, is never far away. Her grey bob rustles with a restless energy.
Even at 75 this energy is prodigious. She has clocked up 13 novels, 11 volumes of short stories and two children. But ask her what her proudest moment was and it is not the day in 1991 when she received the Nobel prize for literature (she gave much of the $1-million purse to the Congress of South African Writers); it was the day in 1986 at the Delmas trial of 22 blacks accused of treason, when she gave evidence in mitigation of sentence.
“There, I felt I put myself on the line,” she says simply. Although the outside world has bestowed upon her fulsome recognition for her sustained efforts to undermine apartheid, she is at pains to play down her role. “I think one has to be very realistic. I don’t think that writers anywhere, for a long time, have had a real influence. I think that probably we achieved two things: first, those of us who got known overseas definitely had an effect through our work, through showing how people lived, rather than just a news report of a riot or something, to show how this affected people’s daily lives and their personal relationships.
“I think we did rouse a lot of interest in the conscience of the world about apartheid. Within the country, to a lesser extent, because you must remember the high rate of illiteracy and the lack of libraries, so we didn’t reach a very wide public.
“But we served a purpose there in that we expressed things that people kept locked up in themselves, we showed that it was possible to come out and say these things. So perhaps we had a heartening effect, to help them retain the legitimacy of their resentment. But we didn’t influence any government because they banned us or ignored us. I don’t think any writers since the generation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in France have influenced a government.”
I have to ask Gordimer the question I know incenses her: is there literary life after apartheid? With her last two novels, None to Accompany Me and The House Gun, she has moved on to the fluid social landscape of the new South Africa – the ambiguities kicked up by the dismantling of the old pecking order. Reviews of her latest books have been mixed; some critics say that, deprived of the familiar landscape of apartheid, her step has faltered. I toss in some camouflage, the comparison with writers in post-Cold War eastern Europe, the steep decline in the world’s interest in South Africa post- apartheid. But I still flinch as she uncoils herself.
“Their interest was in something called apartheid. They were projecting on South Africa many of their own prejudices that they felt bad about or they felt resentful about – and they wanted to see how other people worked it out. We can’t offer them that any more, but the whole of the rest of life is what we are living. Life didn’t stop! Indeed life has opened up. I could think of a dozen situations that could come up, that I hope are going to be written about as they happen.”
So how would the report card of the new South Africa experiment go thus far? “The new South Africa is not an experiment! The other thing, apartheid, was a fantastic experiment in social engineering. I think when we look back on this century, there’ll be these two tremendous experiments – the one was dividing Germany, and the other was apartheid, both of which came to an end within months of each other.”
Gordimer grew up just outside Johannesburg in Springs, a dreary mining town ringed by slag heaps. Her father was a watchmaker. “Now I wish I knew more about him,” she says, softening briefly. “He was 13 when he came to South Africa from Latvia, alone, and he must have had only a couple of years’ primary school education. At that time it was very difficult for Jews in the Baltics to get any higher education. I often tell my black comrades my father really had the experiences that you had or that your parents had. After my father died, I found copies of my books with little bookmarks in them, but usually about 10 pages in: I don’t think he got any further. And he never said anything about the books – but was proud that his daughter was a writer.”
Her dislocation began young: English- speaking in an Afrikaans town, a Jewish girl at a Catholic convent. At the age of 11, her domineering mother (a Jewish immigrant from England) pulled her out of school for an imagined heart ailment, and from then on she was educated at home, reading voraciously and eclectically in the local library. “It’s not something I want to look back on very happily because I realise that then I lost my childhood, my friends. It was a very lonely time and I became a little old woman.”
She tosses her grey bob and quickly continues: “But I have no patience with people who live on the excuses of a crummy childhood – many of us have had crummy childhoods, one way or another.”
She began a literature degree at the University of Witwatersand but left after a year because, having read precociously, she found the course dull. It did have one life-changing effect, however. She came into contact with the university’s small quota of black students: “Journalists, writers, musicians, with whom I had more in common than my white contemporaries back in the mining town.”
Some whites try to disparage Gordimer as the pom-pom girl of the new South Africa, a cheerleader for the African National Congress, kicking up her literary legs on the political sidelines in unquestioning support. What does she make of the view that the ANC is beginning to show autocratic tendencies itself, that the infant democracy is drifting towards that favourite African template, a de facto one-party state? And how does she answer critics who claim that the only effective opposition today is white- dominated parties?
“But whose fault is that?” she demands. “What’s stopped whites from joining the ANC in droves? All those who did have been made very welcome. But not many did, because of that old thing: if you’re white you’ve got to be in charge, you’ve got to dictate the policy. There’s still this mindset, I think.”
Gordimer positively dances with impatience at the whingeing and special pleading of South Africa’s whites. She approved of Nelson Mandela’s speech in which he took an uncharacteristically tough line on white recalcitrance.
“They saw him as an angel who said we all love each other and we’re all part of the rainbow and all that stuff. But I think what Mandela was doing was showing that we’ve gone through a certain stage, he has shepherded us through this. Now he’s realised that some of the things that he wanted to achieve by the methods he was using have not been achieved, and so it was a transitional speech to move into the phase when Thabo Mbeki comes in and tackles these inequalities in a more determined and less conciliatory way.”
As I pack up to go, Nadine Gordimer, the severe, austere Ms Gordimer, does the most extraordinary thing – she tells a joke, a racial joke. “Of course in America,” she warns me, “you can’t say call a spade a spade. I’ve been caught out on that one before.”
And she breaks into peals of delighted laughter. I sit there grinning at the implausibility of this, and then I realise that after 40 years of implacable opposition to apartheid, Nadine Gordimer is truly colour-blind.