The Times - Johannesburg, South Africa
April 6, 2008
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Prime of Ms Gordimer: The author at home in Johannesburg. Picture: Bram LammersExpecting a strict disciplinarian, Aspasia Karras encounters a startlingly playful Nobel Laureate.
Arriving to interview Nadine Gordimer is a bit like arriving for an interview with your school principal. It could go either way — stark humiliation or edified surprise. As she leads us through her kitchen into her home the impression strengthens. She is, and has been for quite some time, venerable, and that awareness keeps her tiny frame firm and unyielding. It does not help that she is notoriously cagey when it comes to granting interviews and insights into her personal life.
She positions us in her sitting room, a room embedded in the style of well-to-do intellectuals of the ’50s — bronze heads, books, white paint, a cabinet of china and a Persian carpet. A room untouched by contemporary magazine decorators and trends, it speaks of her pursuit of higher-order principles and of her age. Nadine Gordimer is 84.
We get down to business. She sets the pace, dictates the parameters: no pictures whilst we talk, no talk without a dictaphone, strict timeframe; and then, just like that, she switches into easy banter, shooting the breeze with a lightness that is surprising and gratifying in equal measures, particularly for an author whose work has been circumscribed by the need to tersely map out our society and that grubby, difficult place where the personal intersects with the political. I start by telling her that I really enjoyed the stories in her latest offering, Beethoven Was One-sixteenth Black, and I am not even being disingenuous by flattering her to break the ice.
Because, frankly, like a naughty pupil, I have always felt that reading Gordimer was like taking medicine. In English literature classes it was ostensibly good medi- cine, what with the Nobel Prize and all — our closest shot at a canon. Whilst in comparative literature classes it was definitely bad. Sitting down to her latest pill, I had braced myself to swallow quickly and get on with it.
Gordimer once wrote, “A writer, is ‘selected’ by his subject — his subject being the consciousness of his own era”; and she is nothing if not a chronicler of her time. Right now it seems she finds herself at a place where she has broken free of the confines of territory. Her stories are at once global and personal, mostly playing out in a petit bourgeois setting of academia and professional life, featuring characters with a worldly provenance . In her choice of subject she seems to be finally liberating herself and her fellow South Africans from our rancid political concerns and turning us into citizens of the world.
More interestingly, she draws the reader into a series of literary games, witty asides and a rather surprising gutter humour. When asked for his impressions of the Big Hole in Kimberley, Frederick Morris, the academic in search of his “black sixteenth” in the title story, answers, “Deep.” And what to make of the tapeworm whose comfortable existence is brought short by his host in Tape Measure? The parasite comments laconically, “Jonah was spewed by the whale. But I — the term for it, I believe — was shat out.” Gordimer laughs, “It was a wry piece of humour. It was really a transmigration — from what we know about ourselves and what our behaviour might imply resides inside us. These lower forms that we despise — how high are we in our behaviour?”
Perhaps the permission to play, which she has granted herself, is both a function of her age and her own proximity to death. In Dreaming of the Dead, the only story that she says reflects her own life, she dreams of a dinner in a Chinese restaurant with the recently deceased trio of Edward Said, Susan Sontag and Anthony Sampson. In the dream she imagines their trajectory in the beyond. “It’s tongue- in-cheek, Edward would say to me; we are both writers, but I am also a musician and of course he was once. He travelled often with Daniel Barenboim. Once they are no longer here, you think about what other lives they could have had, other attitudes they could have had, and dear Susan, who was always such a feminist, she would be amused.” She would have to be, as in her story Gordimer has Sontag arguing for male rights, whilst Said has completed the composition of a symphony.
Could she imagine another life for herself? “Oh yes, when I was a little girl I was a passionate dancer. I was rather good on points: I imagined being a dancer in a corps de ballet. What a good thing that I changed, because now at my age I would have been washed up long ago, whereas writers and conductors can go on till they drop.”
‘Dropping’ is clearly a preoccupation. She turns death over and examines it pruriently and repeatedly in many of the stories. But she chooses firmly for the thrust and push of life in her game of alternative endings, where she plays with the senses and returns to her strong suit — the complex sexual lives of her characters.
She interjects an authorial voice: “There is a choice in the unpredictability of humans; the forms of storytelling are arbitrary. There are alternative endings; I’ve tried them out, here, for myself.
“That is something I have never done before — as a writer I keep out of the stories. I have always disliked it in other people’s writing: the writer elbowing in. It amused me just for once to do it. Now in my old age I will just say some- thing about this process of writing. The stories are about the same situation of marital infidelity solved differently — after all, in one case their whole sex life is improved — he is better than ever.”
I ask her how she manages to write about sex with such facility and insight. “Well I have thought this a long time in my life — two driving motivations for human behaviour are sex and politics.” At which point I feel I must interject to ask her what she thinks of the state of the nation.
“I am very troubled and very disturbed indeed. I try to remind myself that if you look back in history this is natural. Once you are free and have a wonderful constitution, then we are human beings and normal rivalries for power. Material possession and normal life will emerge — still it’s very troubling. Personally, I cannot accept that Mr Jacob Zuma can be the next president — I cannot believe that he has the moral fibre. However one may feel about Mr Mbeki, he has moral fibre.
“I judge him on his actions. I have been disappointed about his lack of taking the helm on Aids — I have spoken openly about it. But he has done his best to bring common sense to the despotic leaders around us. With Zimbabwe he has only very recently had support from the African Union and the rest of the world. I cannot see how he would have done it on his own. If God came down from heaven to Mr Robert Mugabe, he would say, ‘You are the devil in disguise, a British imperialist in disguise.’ Mugabe is a tragic case both in his person and in his position in power — it’s tragic what happened to him.”
She is still forthright about her politics and takes umbrage at my questioning of the white label of ‘liberal’. “It is not something that applies to me. I am a leftist, and a member of the ANC. People feel dismissive. Liberalism is not, in general, a bad thing at all, but in extreme situations it’s inadequate.” She chastises me for my political digression by recommending a return to the subject of literature. There’s the principal again, one cast in the mould of Albus Dumbledore, benevolent, if impenetrable at times.
In her writing she seems to have moved on to more temporal and humane questions than our concerns with political succession. Has her writing changed in retrospect? “When I was 14 or 15 years old, one of my first adult stories was written from the point-of-view of an old man. When I look back it was amazing: how did I know how an old man feels? I have lived through every age — writers have this ability of projection from one identity to another. I write differently at every stage because I have lived more — writing is a matter of discovery. You will never get to the end of it.” Beethoven Was One-sixteenth Black: And Other Stories is published by Penguin, R180
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