NADINE GORDIMER

Nadine Gordimer: Writer with the Eye of a Camera

by

Bernard Sachs

I once asked Nadine Gordimer what it was like having everything in the world. “It’s lovely,” was her unaffected reply. Yes, Nadine just about has everything in the world---literary talent of a high order, financial means, and looks. But Nadine has not got everything in the world---it was only a manner of speaking. In any event, what could be more boring than to have everything in the world? For an artist like Nadine, eternal striving, as propounded by Goethe in his Faust, and not bourgeois quiescence, is the only thing worth while. But even in the less rarified world than the artistic, Nadine could not have reached that happy state of equilibrium. For behind her outward appearance of serenity, I seem to detect a note of sadness, even bordering on the tragic. What person with sensibilities, such as Nadine’s, can derive any kind of serenity from the uncertainties that everywhere beset us in this land of ours? Nadine is one of the committed writers. Her discontents are not of the anarchic ‘angry young men’ variety, resting largely on the narrow base of individual rebelliousness and neurosis, stemming from the malaise of a civilisation in decline. It is more broadly based on the social eruptions of the South African scene, progressive, if ominous, that are meaningful in terms of those abiding human values which the artist seeks to enshrine.

I have always found Nadine modest, to the point of being demure. There is no outward sign that she has allowed her success to go to her head. And I have evidence of her generosity of spirit: I was discussing the late Herman Bosman with her. “What a giant he was!” was her obeisance to him. That is all I am prepared to say about Nadine as a person. I don’t know enough of her to speak with any certitude, and much that I do know has been said before. In any event, Nadine is so essentially the writer that details about her private life are extrinsic to her real personality, which is closely and indissolubly interwoven with her literary creativity.

Nadine has been endowed with a keen, perceptive mind and an excellent pen. Whatever she will write will always have the stamp of quality and carry the reader along. I am not certain that this is a good thing. For the glitter of her technique and style blinds the reader, even the expert, to shortcomings in the more basic things. The Rider Haggardian romance in which the South African Colour question is swathed overseas, further militates against the proper evaluation of South African writers. The Colour question threatens to replace the eternal Jewish question. And it is even more of a boon to our writers than to the Nationalists at election. Time. Sensible people from overseas lap it up indiscriminately, in the way the unintelligent lap up crime and sex. It may be good for Nadine in the short run, but not in the long run. For she is the one person technically equipped to become a major novelist. But her progress will be impeded if overseas critics will, through allowing political sentiment to obtrude into the frame of artistic reference, mistake a sound water colour for a good oil painting.

In a talk I had with Professor Edward Davis, Head of the English Department of the University of South Africa, he said that Nadine had the verbal equipment and fluency to become a great writer, but that she needed to be bashed about by life and kicked in the guts to realise herself in full. And he added that she would have been well advised to have suppressed everything she has so far written. Whether he is right or not, it is my impression that Nadine, despite her thorough knowledge of the Colour question, evidence of which is to hand from her excellent article on the subject in a recent number of The Twentieth Century, has not yet succeeded in translating her knowledge into novelistic terms. She is still in the essayistic stage---that is, she can enlighten us on the problem of the African in the anonymous mass, but she cannot illumine him as an individual, and add new territory to our knowledge through psychological insight. You feel that the words they speak do no come across the warmth breath of a living being, but flow as the cold ink of Nadine’s pen, however excellent. A more intimate knowledge of the African at a lower level of cerebration is the first essential if Nadine is to make the necessary qualitative leap in the writing of the novel. She has much to learn from Athol Fugard’s No-Good Friday in this regard. Such characters as do emerge in her novels derive from her knowledge of the middle class, to the ennui of whose lives she pays far too much attention. I cannot find anything particularly new in what she says of them.

Reference to William Faulkner, who deals in his novels with the Negro in the Southern States---a milieu not unlike our own---will illustrate the point. A white woman has been murdered---the novel is Light in August---and a Coloured man is suspected of the crime. The spirit of lynch law pervades the scene and a Negro is being roughly interrogated. Here is a short excerpt:
             There came only into his face when the strap fell across his   
        back a wince, sudden, sharp, fleet, perking up the corners of his
        mouth and exposing his momentary teeth like smiling. Then his
        face smoothed again inscrutable.
              “I reckon you aint tried hard enough to remember,” the
        sheriff said.
              “I can’t remember because I can’t know,” the negro said. “I
        don’t even live nowhere near here. You ought to know where I
        stay at, white folks.”
              The strap fell again, the buckle raking the negro’s back. “You
        remember yet?” the sheriff said.
               “It’s two white men,” the negro said. His voice was cold, not
        sullen, not anything. “I don’t know who they is nor what they
        does. It aint none of my business. I aint never seen them. I just
        heard talk about how two white men lived here. I didn’t care
        who they was. And that’s all I know. You can whup the blood
        outen me. But that’s all I know.”
Reading these few actual words spoken by the Negro, there flashes through you all his smart and anguish, in the way I never experienced the tragedy of our race problems in all the talk about the African in The Lying Days or A World of Strangers. Descriptions, however powerful, are not enough.
       
Now you might say that Faulkner is a genius. Let us therefore take a black South African writer to illustrate the point. Here is an excerpt from The Woman Walks Out by Ezekiel Mphahlele. A black woman is talking about ritual at the graveside:
        “And people must not rob the dead man of his final moment of
        glory by speaking so much at the grave side or in the Church.
        People will then want to know who spoke the best; who
        preached; who read the last words over the dead, who were
        there, and many other things except those about the dead. They
        forget all about the peaceful picture of a person lying with arms
        crossed, a head full of beautiful flowers; eyes and ears closed to
        all the useless and passing show of this rough world. Now, why
        shout over this grave? Why tell so many lies about him, things
        you were afraid or too proud to say about him when he lived?
        Give him his last chance. The man must be king, the woman
        must be queen for the last time. Before the white man came, we
        never used to speak upon the dead: we just wept and buried
        him.”
There is an authenticity about this, an earthiness, which I have not come across in Nadine’s writings. I cannot help thinking that Nadine has got to know more about the Colour question from discussions in cosy drawing rooms round the tea table, than from over a fire from a paraffin tin in Alexandra Township. To the essayist it may not make a big difference, but to the novelist it definitely does. When I once told Nadine that she has her sights leveled at the middle level of society, which is too pallid here in South Africa to offer much to the novelist, and that she would have to lower her sights earthwards, she answered me that the artist gets his material wherever he can find it. That may be, and I do not wish to be dogmatic on so subtle and intricate a subject. But I still think that the racial tensions in this country are for a long time going to be the most fertile field for the South African novelist. More especially in this the case with Nadine, who is completely involved in the racial politics of the country---she has probed it intellectually and is emotionally wrapped up in it. Her hopes and fears issue from it, and it forms the sub-stratum of her two novels. This is her milieu, and she must conquer it, or reach a dead end as a novelist.

What are her chances of success? It is very uncertain. Nadine has a very keen eye and an excellent memory. Her eye roves like a camera over a wide scene, and picks out fine detail that illuminates the landscape, because the lens is very good. But it is all panning (“pan” is Hollywood’s abbreviation of panorama)---there is no close up of living, speaking characters. And it is not an X-ray camera. She gives us a tremendous amount of detail, but not the psychological depth which would enable her to create real living characters.

Her first novel, The Lying Days, was as a novel more successful than her second, A World of Strangers, because it is largely autobiographical, and Nadine knows herself quite well. But the characters outside herself never came to life. They are her lovers, who come, copulate, and go. A World of Strangers is fundamentally weak. Nadine sets out to show that in this race ridden South Africa we are all isolated from each other. There is no vital communication between people. It is a good theme, requiring a Tolstoyan canvas to realize it in full. But how does Nadine set about it? She imports the Englishman Toby Hood to act as the leading character and the pivot of the novel. What we feel at the end of the novel is not that South Africa is a world of strangers, but that Toby is a stranger to this country. He is a new comer and just is not sufficiently of its soil to enter into any serious and deep relations with the other characters. Toby’s main field of operations is the bed, and he gives the impression of being as committed here as a policeman from the Johannesburg Immorality Squad. I gather that his failure to make contact with his women illustrates the spiritual depletion of synthetic white society---as against the virility and naturalness of the Africans, which is revealed in the shebeen dances. But to me it only proved that the Englishman Toby was aloof from the people about him---and that connection is not communication. The novel has been described by a critic as a travelogue of Johannesburg. That is right. It gives Nadine an opportunity to do some roving with the TV camera of her mind. And she does it very well. An important omission from the book is Toby’s personal and human relationship to an African female which, if properly handled, would have remedied many defects and have lifted the novel to a new plane. There is evidence that Nadine was toying with the idea. But she fought shy of it---for the reason, I believe, that she would not have been able to make it work. The nearest she came to it, was when Toby takes to bed Anna Louw, who is a negrophile. But the crucial test---for Toby, and the novel---never comes.

Toby is supposed to be the pivot of the novel, but he is no more than a weak link between pallid characters and unexciting situations. The single parts just do not add up to an integrated whole. What made a lasting impression on me was a remarkable description of a field of thorn bushes and bramble. I felt my flesh lacerated reading it.

A World of Strangers is better written than The Lying Days, which was saturated with imagery. The tree groaned under the weight of the fruit, some of it oversized. Nadine was still very much under the influence of Proust. The Lying Days is dedicated to Nadine’s daughter, Oriane. Was Oriane dedicated to Proust’s Oriane de Guermantes? Her fineness of Proustian detail is more suited to the decadence of the aristocratic French salon, than to the Witwatersrand. In the French salon, the wink of an eye is full of significance. Along the Witwatersrand it just means that a bit of dust from a mine dump has got into her eye. The writing in A World of Strangers is much keener, and on a higher level all round. It represents a definite advance. The Proustian posturing has gone.

I cannot agree with Professor Davis that Nadine should have suppressed all that she has written so far. Her short stories have genuine literary quality---for the reason that psychological depth and the clash of character are not so essential in this medium. Her keen observation stands in good stead here. She has not reached the level of Herman Bosman so far. But then Bosman was a “giant.” His two masterpieces “Unto Dust” and “Funeral Earth” deserve a place next to the best of Chekhov and de Maupassant. Neither am I sure that Professor Davis is right when he says that Nadine will improve her writing when life hits her hard. I believe that her talents, whatever they are, are deeply rooted in her total personality and will not be easily modified environmental pressures, however severe. I can best make the point by drawing on what Leontine Sagan had to say to me about the artistic Jew, when I saw her some time ago. She knew Max Reinhardt intimately. She told me that he regarded the main strength of the Jewish actors their intellect and analytical capacity, but that they lacked a naturalness and an earthiness because of their racial rootlessness. It is not a full explanation---Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt contradict it---but there is some point to it, and I would say that it partly explains Nadine’s strength and weakness. She has not got the same feel for her characters as Mrs. A. A. Murray has in The Blanket or Alan Paton in Cry, The Beloved Country. For one thing, the English, especially outside of the towns, are more rooted in this country than the Jew, and the pastoral Africa is a simpler problem novelistically than the urbanized African, which is Nadine’s métier. There is closer contact between white and black in the rural areas, where in the towns an iron curtain divides the two racial groups. Nadine substitutes for naturalness and earthiness her intellect and technique, which she possesses in abundance. Dan Jacobson is a parallel case, except that he is both a lesser novelist and a lesser short story writer than Nadine. Sarah Gertrude Millin is an exception. In her best novels, such as Mary Glenn, her aesthetic drives emanate from the Unconscious---well away from the cerebral.

From: Bernard Sachs, South African Personalities and Places, Kayor Publishers, Johannesburg, 1959.