Gordimer’s ‘authentic celebrant’

Was John Matshikiza’s column (”The good, the bad and the ungrateful”) a belated audition for the Winnie Mandela Football Club? Setting out to ”defend” Nadine Gordimer, Matshikiza offered merely a primal scream at me; an untreated mental paroxysm: an awesome sight, rare on the public page.

According to Matshikiza, Gordimer thinks my book is ”not up to scratch”. He had better, then, explain the letter that Gordimer wrote to me on January 16 last year, giving her ”overall impression” of the book: ”The critical writing — yours — about my work, its development, its contradictions as well as its creative solutions painfully arrived at, its relation, through me and my evolvement [sic], with politics and the history-as-politics that we call ‘our times’ — all this is outstandingly excellent. I speak of the criticism as well as the praise; I speak of the insights you have that are truly illuminating, even to me, of my own writing. Thank you!” It is Gordimer’s vanity issues, not the book’s literary and historical qualities nor any questions of fact, that fuel the current dispute.

Matshikiza wants ”solid proof of the worthiness of [my] work” given the supposed objections of Jonathan Galassi, the Farrar Straus & Giroux editor. How about what Galassi wrote to me upon first reading the manuscript, before Gordimer’s editorial intervention: ”I want to say that I am favourably impressed with the sensitivity, style, insight, scene-painting, context building that you have brought to this task. You bring Nadine and her various worlds marvelously alive. I don’t know anything of her reaction yet, but my own hunch is that she too — once she has absorbed the shocks that being written about so intently must give rise to — will be taken with, glad about, what you have done. She ought to be in any case, in my view … I think what you have done is eminently worthy and revealing of her greatness.” But then Gordimer objected and Galassi flip-flopped.

The one-sided ”debate” thus far run by the Mail & Guardian evades the big question: what does Gordimer’s editorial tampering mean for the protracted processes of South African cultural reconnection within the African diaspora? Which of the diaspora’s voices will be ”authorised” to get out on the global stage where old timers such as Ronald Segal (Gordimer’s embarrassingly self-serving London defender) now dominate?

In this context Matshikiza’s openly xenophobic invective against me marks him, rather ironically, as a product of an antiquated laager culture, ill at ease within the broader African diaspora, giving mysteriously frenzied attention to my Indian middle name. In a previous column Matshikiza mockingly pronounced himself unable to tell Haiti from Tahiti and he wondered why President Thabo Mbeki would waste time visiting either place. Now Matshikiza is at it again (”The man comes over from Trinidad” he sneers). He even defends Galassi, despite the long history of New York editors pressuring native intellectuals for inauthentic and sanitised texts — for what Chinua Achebe, referring specifically to New York editors, denounced as ”deodorised dogshit.”

Matshikiza’s insular nativism places him in the otherwise unexpected company of that odd right-winger, RW Johnson. In the London Sunday Times on August 15 Johnson wrote: ”An educated West Indian immigrant to South Africa, Roberts benefited from the poverty of apartheid education, which means there is only a tiny handful of indigenous black intellectuals.” I sat aghast, wondering how Johnson could overlook such major and active minds as Njabulo Ndebele, Jakes Gerwel, Mamphela Ramphele, Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Joel Netshitenzhe, Barney Mthombothi, Pallo Jordan, Keorapetse Kgositsile and Zakes Mda. But then along came Matshikiza’s column, an undeniably splendid example of one black South African’s intellectual paucity in full cry. Was his essay a deliberate hoax offered as ”Exhibit A” to RW Johnson?

What are the intellectual responsibilities of the biographer? Be ”grateful”, says Matshikiza, a long-time boulevardier of the liberal suburbs, faulting me for ingratitude. For decades the Matshikiza family has had Gordimer’s personal generosity, which Matshikiza naughtily fails to disclose. Gordimer sent John’s father, Todd, a piano in Lusaka and helped with legal problems over King Kong. But gratitude, however befitting Matshikiza’s personal circumstances, hardly makes good biography.

Shaun de Waal says ”the biographer’s contract with the reader” is to produce ”an edifying text” that ”shows why this person’s life is exemplary in some way”. De Waal does not see that this sets us back a century, reviving the innocent pomposity thought to have died with Lytton Stratchey’s comment: ”Discretion is not the better part of biography.”

The soap-opera term ”betrayal” —De Waal’s thunderbolt thrown at me — is not the vocabulary of critical intelligence, but the jangling jail-key of a deadening piety.

To celebrate such a classic writer as Gordimer, one must discomfit the writer’s felt sense of self. The good biographer is never merely a stenographer. ”So we arrive at a certain paradox,” writes JM Coetzee. ”The classic defines itself by surviving. Therefore the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed. For so long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself a classic.” Gordimer, a writer of truly classic grandeur, needs not Matshikiza’s sadly inarticulate protections.

On the Friday (August 13) that De Waal’s essay appeared, the Times literary supplement had a superior essay by Nicolas Jenkins on biography: ”Whatever is passed over in silence by an autobiographer should surely be one of the biographer’s main areas of concern. Not because readers want to, or can, pass judgement on the human being, but because the more crepuscular, sinister or contradictory a life appears, the better and fresher the work usually looks. Sadly, this is an opportunity largely forsaken in Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography for reasons that may have less to do with the author than with the ‘authorisation’ tellingly foregrounded in the book’s subtitle.”

I have not forsaken Gordimer. I have instead cast off the treacherous epaulettes of her ”authority”. I am Gordimer’s authentic celebrant, while Matshikiza is killing her with kindness and himself with hypertension.