A ‘struggle’ writer hard to read and harder to ignore
| Nadine Gordimer wielded a biting pen but critics found her stiflingly correct, writes
NADINE Gordimer’s fame as a writer greatly exceeded her popularity as a writer. A guilty secret shared by many South Africans was that they found the local Nobel laureate’s novels unreadable.
Her writing was so closely associated with the ANC and the struggle against apartheid that not reading her seemed like a political act, a commentary on the strength of one’s opposition to apartheid and admiration or lack of it for the anti-apartheid warriors she idolised.
One felt duty-bound to read her because it seemed the politically correct thing to do. And so one tried conscientiously on and off down the years to finish a Gordimer novel, but simply could not. This went for her post-apartheid novels as well.
They were greeted with lukewarm enthusiasm by people who read for pleasure.
This was not because her novels were political, as she was wont to suggest. After all, JM Coetzee’s books were political and were widely read in South Africa. One book in particular, Disgrace , was close to being a best seller.
Gordimer, whose sense of political correctness was so refined that she could not bring herself to mention the full title of one of her favourite novels, Joseph Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus (“something of the Narcissus” she would say with a barely concealed shudder), did not like Coetzee’s 1999 Booker prize winner about the rape of a white woman by a black man.
The two South African Nobel prize winners had a strained relationship after Coetzee attacked her for with- drawing an invitation to Salman Rushdie to speak in South Africa. (She was told his life would be in danger, she said. “Should I have let him come and perhaps be killed?”)
She was critical of Coetzee’s emigration to Australia and sent him a list of criticisms of Disgrace , which, one picked up between the lines, did not improve their relationship.
In a deft sideswipe when asked why Disgrace was so much more widely read than any of her own books, she implied that Coetzee’s work did not always measure up to what she considered “serious” literature.
“I don’t think any of us who are ‘serious writers’ in South Africa are widely read,” she said.
The possibility that she might not have a very engaging literary style was something she icily dismissed. Her thousands of overseas readers
One felt duty-bound to read her because it seemed the politically correct thing to do
might beg to differ, she would retort.
Nevertheless, Alan Paton, whose Cry, the Beloved Country was a political novel and a “serious” novel and a runaway bestseller, found it difficult to engage with Gordimer’s writing.
“I cannot remember experiencing any emotion while reading anything she has written,” he said in the 1980s after her most famous books, including Burger’s Daughter and The Conservationist (for which she won the Booker prize in 1974) had been published.
Her prose was criticised by reviewers who did not feel obliged to praise her to prove their anti-apartheid credentials as artless, jargonridden, reading too much like a political pamphlet and charmless.
Her syntax was often convoluted and her themes and characters sometimes unbearably predictable.
It is a fair bet to say that many people who read her anti-apartheid novels did so more because they identified with the cause she espoused than because of their literary merit.
Opinion was divided, although it is hard to see why, on whether Gordimer was a political activist who used her novels as a vehicle for the cause, or a novelist devoted first and foremost to her craft. She was so close to the ANC that, certainly until 1994, she was practically an embedded, or in-house, ANC novelist. She provided a safe house for ANC activists on the run, drove them to the border, acted as a courier, helped to edit Nelson Mandela’s famous Rivo- nia Trial speech and became a cardcarrying party member as soon as it allowed whites to join.
Whether a more critical analysis and portrayal of the ANC and South African Communist Party and its leaders might have better served the interests of the country (not to mention her readers), as opposed to the interests of the ANC and SACP, is a question she may or may not have been trying to answer in an interview two years ago. “We were naive, because we focused on removing the apartheid government and never thought deeply enough about what would follow.”
Her use of “we” leaves no doubt that she thought of herself primarily as an ANC cadre.
The question was not whether, but the extent to which, Gordimer’s status as a favoured ANC insider detracted from the artistic merit of her work. This, in addition to her narrative limitations, was undoubtedly why many found reading her hardly worth the trouble.
Gordimer was born in Springs on the East Rand on November 20 1923. Acting apparently on a doctor’s diagnosis of an incipient heart condition, her mother pulled her out of school at the age of 11, deciding that her heart was too weak for the roughand-tumble of school life. She took her to the doctor so often that Gordimer suspected that her mother’s real motivation was her passion for the doctor — her marriage to Gordimer’s father being both unhappy and intellectually unfulfilling.
Gordimer was taught by tutors and had no contact with children her own age. Her childhood was solitary and books from the Springs library were her salvation.
She resented her mother terribly for this and only in her 50s, shortly before her mother’s death, could she bring herself to make up with her.
Gordimer’s memories of her father remained harshly unforgiving. He arrived in South Africa from Latvia at the age of 13, alone in the hold of a ship, not speaking a word of English, and scraped together enough money from fixing watches on the mines to start a jewellery shop.
“He just didn’t have the guts to become much of a personality,” she said of him.
By the age of 21 she was a published writer, but without matric she felt the want of a formal education. This she remedied by doing a one-year “general studies” course at the University of the Witwatersrand, designed for returning World War 2 veterans. It was here that she mixed with black people for the first time and began developing a political consciousness.
Her use of ‘we’ leaves no doubt that she thought of herself primarily as an ANC cadre
She married an orthodontist in her mid-20s and had a daughter. The marriage ended in 1953 and the following year she married art dealer Reinhold Cassirer, who had managed to escape Berlin with his family just ahead of the Nazis. They were married for 48 years until his death in 2001.
Gordimer hated interviews and usually only grudgingly agreed to them when she had a book to plug. She protected her privacy fiercely and angrily withdrew authorisation for a biography by Ronald Suresh Roberts when she felt he was prying too closely into her personal life.
Readers had no right to know about the private life of writers, she believed. “There’s no entitlement at all.”
She is survived by two children.