Comet from Springs borne aloft on her literary wings
Knowing and learning from Nadine Gordimer was a rich and singular experience, says Maureen Isaacson
NADINE Gordimer, who died last weekend at the age of 90, was a brilliant raconteur. She said that, in her 15 novels and numerous collections of short stories, she was always writing the same story. She wrote what she called an “alternative history” that exposed “the private life, the private perceptions, the way the historical and socio-political issues have shaped and are shaping people”.
For the past decade and a half, we walked together on Sundays in the Botanical Gardens in Emmarentia with her Weimaraner. She called it a green lung; it provided a shot of oxygen as she explained the world to me, the formation of tree roots and the way terns protected their eggs, recounting stories from her own life.
After a period of transition, she retreated into what appeared to be her essential self, preparing to make her final journey. The warm tributes across the globe after her death last week were a reminder of the clamour and excitement of her public life.
I wondered how the girl from the small gold mining town of Springs had succeeded in soaring like a comet in a brilliantly realised life.
I was fortunate to hear some of the stories first hand.
Her father, Isidore Gordimer, came to South Africa from Latvia with only a skill in watchmaking at 13. He married Hanna “Nan” Meyers, Gordimer’s mother, a Jewish immigrant who came here from London with her parents.
Gordimer was six years old, en route to school in Springs, when a small girl accosted her and slashed her panama hat with a pair of scissors, shouting: “You killed Jesus!” Gordimer always said: “I am a South African first and then a Jew. Being Jewish is like being black; you simply are.”
Sunshine, moonshine, pass the salt: this was Isidore’s entire English vocabulary on arrival in South Africa. He learned to speak English without an accent, as well as Afrikaans and Fanagalo. Coming home from work, Isidore would ask: “What’s news on the Rialto?” Some years ago, I accompanied Gordimer to Pordenone in Italy’s Fruirli region to attend a two-week-long festival in her honour. I pointed to the Rialto bridge in Venice. She said: “Where the news is.” She always wondered; Isidore had not read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, nor had he been to Venice. Here was another mystery of the peculiar collision of factors that shaped Gordimer.
How did we meet? I was drawn to her work, her articulation of the issues we were grappling with, ripping the lid off whiteness and apartheid atrocity, which she brought to the attention of the world. I glimpsed her walking in Joburg and got to know her through the Congress of South African Writers, of which she was a founding
With the rigour of an autodidact she began to school me, encouraging me to fill in the gaps in my reading
member. The association intensified through the sometimes raucous parties in her Parktown home and my engagement, as a literary journalist, with her work. During my formative years, I related to the defiance and rebellion of the protagonist Linda Shaw in her 1953 debut novel, The Lying Days, and its expression of the excitement and uncertainty of young love and Shaw’s surprising discovery that “love was warm”. Gordimer’s work explored the many aspects of love, its connections, failures and betrayals, the responsibilities of parental and filial love and the tensions these engendered.
Gordimer was, in her own characterisation, a corrupt child, a show-off, endowed with the gift of mimicry and a devastating wit. The diagnosis by a family doctor of an irregular heartbeat and her probably unnecessary removal from school at the age of 11 was to have a resounding impact on South African literature. “I was an acrobatic dancer and I loved it, and there I was, at home, and then I went to the library. I was a little pig in clover.” She spoke often about this privilege of which she would have been deprived had she been black. She was not going to let it go to waste. “I was self-taught,” she said, and with the rigour of an autodidact Gordimer began to school me, encouraging me to fill in the gaps in my own reading with Günter Grass, Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky, José Saramago, more.
She met fellow beginner writer Es’kia Mphahlele at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she studied for a year, and their friendship “signalled the tearing up of the colour line”. She was “discovered” and published by the Afrikaans poet Uys Krige, the editor of a small literary journal. He mailed one of her stories to a colleague in the US , who sent it to The New Yorker.
She was married briefly to Gerald Gavronsky, with whom she had a daughter, Oriane. I met Gavronsky at Gordimer’s house and he described the way “the beach lit up”
She was tough, practical, concise, precise and absolutely definite. She defended her ideas fiercely
when he first saw her. Her marriage to Reinhold Cassirer, a German Jew who left Berlin during World War 2 and with whom she had a son, Hugo, lasted until his death in 2001. She never stopped missing him. Their home became a safe house for many, including senior ANC members such as Albert Luthuli, the ANC’s thenleader who stayed there during the Treason Trial in the late 1950s. When Anthony Sampson, the British journalist, came to South Africa to edit Drum magazine, he introduced her to Nelson Mandela and the journalists Can Themba, Henry Nxumalo and Nat Nakasa, with whom she founded The Classic, a literary magazine. She became one of Mandela’s friends, attended the Rivonia Trial and heard him condemned to a life sentence. Thus continued her long friendship with George Bizos, Mandela’s lawyer and close friend, which began at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1948. She was tough, practical, concise, precise and absolutely definite. She defended her ideas, opinions and loyalties fiercely. She knew how to argue and she knew how to listen. I always knew where I stood with her.
Nadine Gordimer has gone. Her face is imprinted on a gold coin and the National Sea Rescue Institute in Hout Bay’s 10m rescue craft is called the MTU-Nadine Gordimer.
I will always hear her saying “Testicles, spectacles, vallet and vatch”, Cassirer’s catch phrase, as we prepared to go out. I will miss the Sunday lunches that followed the walks; the wine and spinach and feta quiche; the coffee and chocolate and the long afternoons in the sun.
She shared generously of her gifts through her great hospitality; she read the manuscripts of fledgling and accomplished writers; she donated to the guide dog association and to the creation of tapes for the blind. Towards the end of her life, she told me that she was ready to die and had sloughed off all that she did not need. What a good title that would be for a memoir, she said, Sloughed Off.