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Interviewer:
You’ve written, in various autobiographicai sketches, of the rather
typical Commonwealth upbringing you experienced: the colonial
schools, the repressive and imitative social rituals, the sighting
of the indigenous culture and history that surrounded you in South
Africa. Could you help us by placing yourself within a
tradition and perhaps talk about your formation as a contemporary
South African writer? What did you have to overcome? What writers
influenced you most early on and with whom do you now feei most
closely identified?
Nadine
Gordimer: I think I was very lucky when I began to write at
an early age because I was able to do so in an unselfconscious
and natural way. I enjoyed a strange kind of freedom, living as
I did in such a cultural backwater from the point of view of the
rest of the world. it was a place that totally ignored what was
on its own doorstep and instead was always Iooking toward the
main cultural streams abroad. There was the local public library
in the small gold mining town in which I lived. I was like a
calf in clover there; nobody guided or advised me; nobody told
me which books I ought to read if I wanted to become a writer. I
read a lot of French and Russian nineteenth century novels, in
translation of course. I drew from whatever there was for me to
feed on.
At the same time, as I was beginning
to write, I felt that nobody would be interested in the world
that I knew, that indeed I wasn’t having in the world: the world
I knew about in books was something to aspire to, perhaps to see
one day; to walk in Virginia Woolf’s and Dickens’ London, to
come to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and Ernest Hemingway’s America.
Then I read Katherine Mansfield
stories, which rang a bell because she was somebody also
living at the end of the world, knowing that she did, and
writing about simple things in her own life. This made me feel
that the gold mining town in which I lived, the people around me
there, the little dramas in the street — these were things one
could write about, and about which, perhaps, somebody might even
be interested in reading.
Growing up as a white colonial in South Africa , I spoke, read and wrote in English
because, at that time, we were part of the
British Commonwealth . Naturally, these political
realities caused me to identify with English literature and
culture, rather than with American or other Anglo-Saxon
cultures, in spite of the fact that the province in which I was
born in 1923 had been a Boer republic. I remember as a little
girl celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accession
to the throne of King George VI and his queen: it was autumn, I
went out into the garden and cut branches of leaves to decorate
the house, and felt very patriotic. They were our king and
queen. So I would have to admit that at the beginning, if I
could claim any tradition, I claimed the culture of British
imperialism.
More precisely, when I began to
write I chose as a model from the point of view of attitude that
of British liberal writers, and in particular the
Bloomsbury group such as E.M.Forster. Forster’s
Passage to India was a book that spoke to me in a way I
didn’t quite understand, yet it represented the British liberal
tradition of that era and, at the same time, referred to a
foreign country in the way my own country was a foreign country.
D.H.Lawrence, De Maupassant, Chekhov and Hemingway were also a
great influence on me when I first began to write short stories,
very different as they all are. But, then, who is there, what
modem writer of short stories has not been influenced by those
four? They created the modern short story. So in a way, I
suppose my early influences were the same as anybody else’s
writing in the English language. There was also the great
American short story writer, Eudora Welty.
What came later was a kind of
analysis of my own work, of the attitudes that t implied and, in
some cases, of the inappropriateness of following those foreign,
imported attitudes. I’m telling you this now in an analytical
fashion. lt didn’t happen to me that way. I simply felt my way
out ot aping the way British liberals thought because it was
inappropriate to the life that I was living and to what was
around me. I had to find a way to express what I had to say
because it was coming out of my own life and the society in
which I lived. So, I had to break with that English liberal
tradition and range further.
Intervìewer: Your own work has been both
praised and faulted for its accumulation of precise detail. Do you
feel this density of detail is what makes the strange world you
write about more accessible for people elsewhere?
Nadine
Gordimer: No, I don’t think so. lt’s significant
detail that brings any imaginative work alive, whatever the
medium. lf you can’t see things freshly, if you can’t build up
through significant detail, then I think you fall into cliché,
not only in the use of words and phrases, but even in form. That
fresh eye is the most valuable thing in the world for any
writer. When I look at my early stories, there’s freshness about
them, there’s a sensuous sensibility I think you only have when
you’re very young; after that you go on to analysing your
characters, you go on to narrative strength. But first, you’ve
got to have that fresh eye with which to see the world ... I
don’t think that in my later work l’ve got that vividness quite
to the extent that I had it, though I may have gained other
strengths. I have lost that freshness because l’ve seen
everything too
often.
lnterviewer: What other strengths would you say you
have gained?
Nadine Gordimer:
Well first of all, I think that narrative was often weak in my
early work. l’ve always been interested in literature that was
held together by what I think of as invisible stitches or
invisible connections. But when attempting a complex novel, one
can’t depend solely on that kind of intuitive observation. So in
order to develop complex themes you have to develop narrative
strength. Perhaps that’s a compensation then: a little of the
one went and I gained with the other.
The criticism you mention about the
accumulation of detail, I think, comes from comparison with my
earlier books, where theme is much less descriptive detail. But
in The Conservationist, for example, the landscape is the
most important character. So therefore, it had to be allowed to
speak and the Iand could only speak and come alive from the
reader through my finding its significant details.
Interviewer:
In JuIy’s People you describe a
South Africa in the throes of
political revolution. Though it’s not possible to say what exactly
will occur in the later stages of that revolution, it does seem
Iikely that white people will not want to stay around to see it
through. Do you think there will inevitably be a time, in the future
of South Africa , when sensible
whites, whatever their political convictions, will have to get out
in order for blacks to consolidate their gains?
Nadine Gordimer:
I would hope (and there are many signs) that ‘sensible whites’
are busy trying to find ways to stay, not to go. Nevertheless,
this may be difficult, because we whites have been brought up on
so many Iies; we’ve been led up the garden path, or sold down
the river by our ancestors in
South Africa
. In other words, whites have developed a totally unreal
idea of how they ought to live, of their right to go on Iiving
in this country. Consequently, they must undergo a long process
of shedding illusions in order fuIIy to understand the basis for
staying in a new, non-racial
South Africa
of the future.
It’s very hard to peel yourself like
an onion, without producing a lot of tears in the process. Yet,
it is absolutely necessary for anybody who wants to stay. People
say to me: ‘isn’t it a terribly depressing place to live?’ Well
in some ways it is, and one gets filled with self-disgust for
being there. But, at other times, it’s completely the other way,
because there are people who are so remarkable. The wonderful
thing is, that every time you think now it’s all finished; this
one’s gone off to jail, or that one has emigrated, that one is
forced into exile, and you allow yourself to think there are not
going to be any more people of that calibre, you’re proved
wrong.
Because with each generation, there
are more people who grow up and rise to the occasion, and this
gives you back your faith in the human spirit.
Since giving this interview, several years ago, the African National
Congress, the most important and largest black liberation movement,
has been unbanned, along with other progressive movements. Nelson
Mandela and other black leaders have been released from prison and
are able to be quoted in the media openly, after nearly thirty years
when nothing they said could be published. Mandela and the African
National Congress avow reconciliation with the whites who accept a
non-racial, democratic
South Africa
under majority rule. So now there is a way for whites to
stay in a country all may share, along with whites like myself who
have identified with the liberation movement through the years when
if was a crime to do so.
[in: Nadime Gordimer, July’s people, Longman 2005]
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