The pleasure of reading this collection of stories can be compared perhaps with spending an afternoon in the company of one who has lived many years deeply and thoughtfully engaged in the business of living, whose conversation is elegant, composed, dry and amused, and sometimes rather sad. Not to be missed — and, unlike an afternoon, rereadable.
The stories are, or seem because of the lightness of their telling, slivers and snippets of episodes perfectly brought to light and sustained in position by succinct asides, strong little wedges or brackets of thought. I use these carpentry terms in response to Gordimer’s own use of such an image.
In Dreaming of the Dead she speaks of ‘the obsessional scaffolding of human existence on earth” — a phrase happily buttressed into how meetings go with old friends — and the scaffolding calls to mind the setting of a stage, the theatre of life and, inevitably, death. In this dream she is with three old friends who have gone before her to Somenowhere; it is the perfect, amusing and, it must be said, quite celebratory obituary and tribute, in which the four of them (mysteriously awaiting another) provide a sort of succinct peer review of one another’s works and raise for consideration important issues.
All three of the others are writers who have made weighty contributions to intellectual and political life in the past 30 years or so. But to name them here would be to spoil the surprise and fun of the dream.
Also in this clever dream-story mention is made of a shebeen called ‘The House of Truth”, a sort of marker that gives notice of what is to come in the rest of the collection in which Gordimer explores certain linked themes. Love and death are often paired, as are truth and voice; and related to this, how to live with the truth, which takes us back to love and death. And so, of course, fear. Fear of death, fear of loss.
And it is only ‘of course” when one has been immersed in these stories which were written over a period of years (one gathers from the acknowledgements). Gordimer pulls together seemingly disparate and random bits and pieces of people’s lives. It’s all grist to the mill: a remark made on radio about Beethoven’s ancestry leads a listener on a search for his own, now desirable, black family (a jokey offering to South Africans still going on and on about race); a box of papers left by an actress leads her daughter in pursuit of her true paternity. In several of the stories the protagonists search for truth or at least information, but Gordimer sagely shows that knowing how to live with the truth, or what to make of it, is not a simple matter.
A great deal of the satisfaction of reading this book comes from Gordimer’s writing style, which is concentrated, swift and clean. She often dispenses with commas and inverted commas, assuming the reader will get into the swing of things, derive the meaning without cosseting. It’s pretty beguiling, being thus admitted to the conversation, which is what these stories are.
One could take an example from any page, but this one concerns the radio listener in the title story who goes off to find whatever darker cousins he might have:
‘Scratch a white man, Frederick Morris, and find trace of the serum of induced superiority; history never over. But while he took a good look at himself, pragmatic reasoning set him leaving the hotel chain whose atmosphere confirmed the sense of anonymity of his presence and taking roads to what were the old townships of segregation.”
In several stories Gordimer reflects interestingly on voice and its importance in our lives. Often unheard in the clatter of our daily existence, it is the quality of voice that makes a difference, contains the ‘truth”. And she is prepared to admit that voice, or truth, can come from unexpected sources: disembodied on the radio, from a beloved’s cello, from a parrot. She returns to it again and again, prompting action. Or with deep understanding she shows language as a barrier or conduit as in Mother Tongue, about a young German wife newly married to a South African, trying to extricate meaning from local complexities of slang and allusion.
It must surely be something Gordimer, as a writer, has often contemplated: her voice on the page. A reviewer cannot hope to convey its power, strength, subtlety, but only send prospective readers to the book itself, where she draws attention to other voices. And for those who have read in recent years similar collections (Margaret Atwood’s The Tent, Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country, even JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year) it must be said that Gordimer’s book easily stands out among them. In fact, some might think it stands several orders above and that is saying something.