‘It is a struggle for the reconciliation of public and private that this book charts,” JM Coetzee wrote of Nadine Gordimer’s essay collection The Essential Gesture in a 1989 review. “This book — the present biography — has attempted to chart that as well,” says Ronald Suresh Roberts on the penultimate page of No Cold Kitchen, his unauthorised — or rather de-authorised — account of the Nobel Laureate’s life and work. Given the prepublication furore that has surrounded the book, the question of how to deal with the space between public and private, and the ethical challenges of revelation, are inevitably in the foreground of any first reading.
No Cold Kitchen provided our small and all-too-tranquil literary world with its finest ruckus in years, when Gordimer withdrew her imprimatur — apparently because Roberts declined to cut or alter passages that made her uncomfortable. Her British and American publishers then backed out of their deal to publish it. “Gordimer bans book” yelled the Sunday Times, sparking an intense but rather crude debate about how such a staunch critic of censorship could engage in it herself (which wasn’t quite what she had done).
Roberts, Gordimer’s defenders suggested, had betrayed her trust, after being granted extraordinary access to not only her time and her friends, but also to her private papers.
In any event, he was now in a remarkable position: he had had all the privileges of Gordimer’s initial cooperation, but the constraints of her authorisation had been removed. It seems the ideal basis for a genuinely interesting biography, deeply informed but capable of sustaining a certain distance from its subject. It was an ethics of reading that Roberts would now have to negotiate, rather than the force of any contract (expressed or implied) with Gordimer and her publishers.
The results are complicated.
No Cold Kitchen is a deeply ambivalent book, which is no bad thing in itself. The debates to come will concern where ambivalence shades into polemic, and what sometimes seems a lack of rigour on the part of the author and his editors in managing the material.
There is a good deal of brilliant biographical criticism here — not in the vulgar sense that the life explains the work, or reduces it to a symptom, but in the sense that the letters, diaries, and interviews create a rich, complicating context for Gordimer’s fiction. Roberts often teases out the intricate strands of Gordimer’s personal, literary and political development with exemplary precision. And he manages to do this, by and large, without too much insistence on the linearity of her progress from uneasy liberalism to more radical politics, or from bourgeois psychological realism to the more allegorical complexity of her later work.
Amid the juicy details — which are legion — what emerges most compellingly is Gordimer’s voice and those of her friends. But there is also some very bad writing:
“The maddeningly ambivalent spirit of the apartheid 1980s Gordimer captures better than anyone else. JM Coetzee’s writing peerlessly portrays the ashen collapse, in awful times, of all that is humane. But for the innards of the terrible beauty that was stirring in the 1980s; to see how idealism mingled with atrocity, even on the side of the angels, and how hope seasoned plight, it is to Gordimer that one must turn.”
It is almost as if Roberts is trying to explain to an irritated Gordimer the presence of Coetzee, who is threaded through the book almost as much as primary characters such as Anthony Sampson, her husband Reinhold Cassirer, and New Yorker editor Katherine White, or to lay the ground for his withering assessment of Gordimer’s post-apartheid role and writing. Roberts repeatedly points out her politically unsound remarks in private correspondence and unscripted asides. This should surprise no one. Gordimer was involved in a very public struggle: of course she edited her private persona to suit that role. It is fascinating to see how she managed the tension so clearly manifest in both her fiction and non-fiction.
To be sure, there is a forensic quality to Roberts’s approach, and a tone that can veer uncomfortably between the courtroom and the tabloid, but the fault-lines are brilliantly documented nonetheless.
The same goes to some extent for Gordimer’s ambivalence over Israel, which is traced here in detail. But it is at this point that things start to go awry, as he shifts from documenting the play of public and private utterances into building a case against her.
There is a good deal that is salient in his critique of Gordimer’s writing on Aids, for example, but instead of laying out the debate around the developing politics of the disease, he lurches into a series of attacks on the Treatment Action Campaign, Zackie Achmat and Judge Edwin Cameron, damning Gordimer by her proximity to them, and giving Aids dissident and conspiracy theorist Anthony Brink the last laugh, quoting with approval his description of her: “sweet old white lady that she is”.
No Cold Kitchen ends with a passage from Gordimer’s unpublished, quasi-autobiographical story The Next-to-Last Will and Testament of Madame Y. The (fictional) author of this confession is reflecting on the infelicity of her account: “It is not what it was, and is. Something has been made of it. I see I should have to write another note to tell the truth behind this one. And then another to put in what’s left out of that …”
Roberts is pointing us here to Coetzee’s essay Confession and Double Thoughts, which details the impossibility of making the final confession necessary to achieve absolution. Each time the story is completed, it becomes clear that its telling has been self-interested, incomplete, guilty, and a new confession must be embarked on. Perhaps Roberts wants his reader to understand his book as a document — inevitably contingent and incomplete — of this abyssal process, with its author in the mediating roles of confessor, interrogator. But he isn’t happy to leave it at that.
The cycle of confession can be ended eschatologically, with the arrival of divine grace, or, legally, with judgement and sentencing.
No Cold Kitchen has as an appendix a facsimile of a 1998 letter: the “single most complete reply”, Roberts says, to the frequently asked question of why Gordimer cooperated (at first) with him: “I agreed to the biography … because [Roberts] knows my writings so well … and — of course — because I took a liking to him … I’m pretty sure he’ll do well, although the whole idea makes me feel posthumous.”
It isn’t necessary to dwell on the relationship between biography and murder — or the death sentence — that Gordimer hints at here. It is enough to notice that the appearance of this letter shows Roberts’s hand more clearly. He wants to set in play the ethical dynamics of a criticism that, like Edward Said’s, is never comfortably at home in its home — an ethics of exile, wandering and endless interpretation. But he can’t resist the discourse of the legal process, of evidence marshalled, truth revealed, and judgement delivered.