Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The atmosphere of these meetings hung about the city, an unease, after two o’clock. Like the more formal mass meetings called from time to time in the City Hall itself, at night, they sometimes ended in an ill-defined scuffle on the edge of the melting crowd: hooligans, in their blind and violent way giving vent to the resentment the city feels at being forced to admit the guilt and fear that lie under indifference.

  The march through Johannesburg last year when the Sabotage Bill was introduced was the last for no one can say how long, since one of the restrictions imposed by the Bill itself was an end of gatherings on the City Hall steps and to protest demonstrations generally. The march was also one of the biggest there has ever been, and it drew a tension between marchers and onlookers that was an extraordinary experience. Assembling for a demonstration of this kind is always a rather foolish-making business: the individuals coming up awkwardly, craning about for the sight of friends; the shuffling and coming and going; the detachment of a figure from the watching crowd, and his sudden appearance beside you in the ranks – has a longing for freedom burst in him like a blood vessel? Is he a paid rowdy muscling in to break up the ranks? Is he merely one of those nameless, placeless pieces of city driftwood that are attracted to any stream of humanity going anywhere? Behind these nervous speculations is a fierce longing to seize the tendrils of impulse which are running, in spite of themselves, from the watchers; the desire of those within the ranks to pull on those feelers of awareness – insults, laughter, embarrassment – anything that offers a hold, a sign of life by which the onlookers might be drawn in to speak up for it.

  On the day of that last march, as on other occasions, the onlookers let the hooligans speak for them. And this time, the last time before their mouths were stopped up once and for all by the accumulation of public safety bills, press bills, censorship bills, they let the hooligans speak in word and deed more uninhibitedly and wildly than ever. All the white man’s battened-down fear of the consequences of the ‘South African way of life’ he has chosen poured out in a mess of infantile regression – senseless blows, rotten eggs, foul words. As the marchers went through the city – filling the width of the street, several thousand strong – these fell upon them at intervals. In between, there was the gaze of flat-dwellers and office workers looking down silently on the passing backs. When the procession passed an elegant first-floor restaurant, five well-dressed men came out on to the balcony, whiskies in hand, to watch. An equally well-dressed man walking near me broke the ranks. The five waved to him, but he stood there in the street, legs apart, palms up, and called: ‘Why don’t you come down here with us?’

  They laughed, and one of them called back, ‘You always were crazy, Reg.’

  For a moment the eyes of the procession were on that balcony where the five men stood glass in hand; then the five turned and went in.

  And so the last march came to its end. The meetings on Freedom Square ended long ago, with the banning of the African National Congress and subsequently the Pan-Africanist Congress, in 1960. The South African Communist Party has been banned since 1950. The Congress of Democrats is banned, too, and the Federation of South African Women, the Liberal Party and others are refused the special permission necessary, now, to hold meetings at the City Hall steps or at any other rallying point in the streets. The speakers who defended human rights against the attrition of one repressive apartheid measure after another, all committed to this over and above their varying political standpoints in the opposition – all are banned, in exile, or under house arrest. Even the posters of the newspapers will soon no longer provide any unwelcome reminders; those that are not closed down by the censorship bill will be guided by it. There is silence in the streets. The indifferent are left in peace. There is nothing to disturb them, now, but the detonations of saboteurs, and the hideous outbursts of secret society savagery.

  1963

  Notes of an Expropriator

  I’ve never before thought of English (Scottish, Irish, Welsh) literature as something that didn’t belong to me as much as to any Briton. It’s quite a shock to be confronted with the old familiars – Hugh Lofting and Chaucer and Burton, Donne, the two Eliots, Lawrence, Greene, Braine and Wain – and be asked politely how they strike me, as if I were a foreigner being shown the crown jewels. I make no claim on your crown jewels; but growing up in South Africa with English as my mother tongue there was no other literature but yours for me to appropriate.

  What has it meant to me? What less can I say than everything? From the day I learned to read, British writers provided my vision of the world; for it seemed, reading what living in that world was like, that I lived outside it – until later, when British literature introduced me to the world of ideas, and made me realise that to this our life belonged just as much as the life of Europe: the only difference was that so little had been thought about or written of our life in Africa.

  Since I know no other language well enough to read what I want in the original, it was through British literature, as well, that I came to know other literatures. I got my Greek drama from Gilbert Murray. Constance Garnett brought me Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Spender introduced me to Lorca, and even Petrarch was first discovered strangely Irished by Synge. It seems incongruous, now, to see myself lying in our dusty garden among the mine dumps, reading aloud:

  If my dark heart has any sweet thing it is turned away from me, and then farther off I see the great winds where I must be sailing. I see my good luck far away in the harbour, but my steersman is tired out, and the masts and the ropes on them are broken, and the beautiful lights where I would be always looking are quenched.

  Why Synge? Well, why not? One of the freedoms of expropriating a literature from 6,000 miles away is that you do not take along with it any of the deadweight of a traditional approach – I was not coerced in my tastes by the kind of education, libraries, journals, conversation, class distinction and even ancient buildings which surround a literature in the country and among the people of its origin. Once you had got through Pooh and Dr Dolittle, Alice and the Water Babies, you were a bibliophagist on the loose. The local library had a steady traffic in novels whose uniform scuffed municipal binding was an honest indication of their unvarying content. But there were some books on the shelves that did not go out from one year to the next; one day, if all the Cronins were bespoken, you might find yourself obliged to try Samuel Butler. By such haphazard means great cracks appear in the washable plastic of daily life. To be literate is to be someone whose crucially formative experience may come just as well from certain books as from events. I know that until I was at least twenty nothing and no one influenced me as much as certain poets and writers. Most of them were British.

  These writers who first set your puny ego roughly on its own feet are usually the ones you don’t remember. One ‘forgets’ them in the self-preservation of letting old ties fall away, and one doesn’t have to feel guilty about it, the way one does over old friends. What the writers did for you has long since become your own, exists perhaps, unrecognisable, somewhere in that rock-bottom on which the coal-flower of self proliferates. Lawrence was the one I can’t pretend to forget: Sons and Lovers, and the stories, and the beast and flower poems. All that was mealy-mouthed, genteelly hypocritical and petty respectable – the whole smug suet of white provincialism that covered my seventeen years, swaddling and shroud in one – became something to kick flying. What other writer anywhere could instil the confidence of a minority of one as Lawrence could? And it was not only rebellion, it was also assertion of the splendour of everything that I was already intoxicatingly drawn to – the claims of friendship rather than the local country club, the strength of the sun, the joyfulness of the natural world and the place in it of human sex. Lawrence’s peevishness and bile went unnoticed; oddly, it is only now, when I have learned for myself that you don’t get splendid anger without side-effects, that I find some of his later writings unreadable.

  I was amused to discover, post-Leavis and years af
ter my Lawrence phase was over, that the time when I was deeply under his influence was in fact the time when he was ‘forgotten’. This, again, was one of the freedoms of an expropriated literature. I had been too far away to know, and too obscure to care, whether certain authors were fashionable or not. It was quite possible for me to be, while ten years behind current taste in the literary world, at the same time ten years ahead of it…

  The serendipity of the library had provided me with Pepys’s diaries at the age of fifteen or thereabouts, but soon after, Everyman’s made my acquaintance with English literature less fortuitous. I had enjoyed Pepys more than I enjoyed Dickens (regarded then, in my canon, as school-prize calibre; I grew up to know better) and I formed a great liking for egocentric and eccentric writers. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy fed my hunger for introspection, and the close-printed list of ‘other titles’ offered similar dark satisfactions. I got from English eccentrics and egocentrics not just encouragement for my own brooding, but also a sense of the hoary variety of British life, and the extraordinary contradiction of a tolerance of so many odd people with astonishing ideas, along with what British writers never tire of exposing as an awesome system of class distinction.

  Perhaps because of the sort of reading I had been doing, Joyce and Ulysses did not surprise me as much as one might have expected. That great sunburst of night-flowering prose carried the inference of multiform to the ultimate. Life was tremendous anywhere, once you admitted it all. Every man his own Dublin. What you experienced in the lavatory was as relevant to the state of being as what you experienced in the pub or in church. The thin hum of your consciousness as you went about the streets was orchestrated richly with the conversation, sensations and unspoken thoughts of others. What other writer can make one as aware of the sheer range of the state of being? Virginia Woolf did as much for the texture of life, of course. Yet, fearless as she was in style and spirit, making her own prose for her own purpose, not shrinking from her own madness, even, there is a point at which all her writings seem fixed to that mark on the wall. It is the point at which the desire to grasp reality becomes the compulsion to fix one’s attention on an object in order, by assuring oneself of the details of its existence, to confirm one’s own. It is the compulsion one feels, when distrait, to stare at a chair or a light bulb on its string. By the way, why (to my knowledge) has no one pointed out to the nouvelle vague that this sort of attempt to prove existence was done so much better by her?

  Most writers make their impact on one once and for all or not at all, but E. M. Forster’s novels seem to contain a series of time-fuses, for me. I am convinced I could go on re-reading them at ten-year intervals all my life, and each time find something apparently revealed specifically for the time – both the historic and personal variety. After all, when I first read him his Edwardian delicacy and his fastidious faith in the sanctity of human relationships were already dated – the war was making nonsense of both: I was also reading The Way We Live Now in Penguin New Writing. Yet after the war, after the gas-chambers and the appearance of the first mushroom cloud, where was there to turn, in the ruins of institutions and political beliefs, but back to individual personal relationships, to learn again the human A B C? And when the recovery was materially triumphant but strangely hollow, Howard’s End and A Room With a View, with their peculiar understanding of the hollowness of the Haves and the strength-without-power of the Have-nots, became newly illuminating. A Passage to India, written while colonialism was in its heyday, remained until the publication last year of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time the most truthful and far-sighted piece of writing ever done about the relationship between coloured people and whites. It is still the best novel on the theme.

  What about George Eliot (Dorothea Casaubon, that priggish lioness, is my favourite female character in any fiction), Chaucer, Thomas Wyatt, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sterne, Angus Wilson, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and many other British writers I couldn’t do without? There is not space to do more than salute them, like beacons, in passing. Shakespeare presents a problem, too; does he go without saying in any context such as this? Alternatively, by halfway through this year, will anyone be able to bear to read another word about him? I should like, however, to slip in a quick word against Lamb’s Tales – like all abridgements, stories of the film. etc., they ought to be abolished. I blame Lamb for the fact that I have never been able to read the comedies with any pleasure (the ‘tale’ without the poetry killed them for me, once and for all); the historical plays and the tragedies, as legendary allegory of the human spirit, have taken for me what might be thought of as the place of the Greeks.

  Shakespeare’s sonnets have never meant as much to me as Donne’s; Eliot has been my poet rather than Auden: in general, it’s the metaphysical that I respond to in British poetry. The romantics never gained much hold on my imagination. The poetry of Shelley, Byron and Keats always seemed to be as much in their lives as in their work. Yet Yeats is the British (Irish) poet who has influenced me most. More than any other poet I have read, he has been able to use, in the intensely private and personal terms of his poetic vision, the (from a poet’s point of view) curiously abstract historical events of which he was part, and even the personalities involved – the stuff of newspapers and political platforms taken into poetry. Can you imagine anyone writing something like ‘Easter 1916’ about the nuclear disarmament protest marchers, or men and women who are in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa today?

  Like all former colonial subjects, I am finally ready to turn the advantages gained while under subjection to the purpose of pointing out what these have failed to provide. ‘Everything’ becomes ‘Everything but—’. In the 1960s, if one read nothing but British literature, where would one look for novels in the great nineteenth-century British tradition? Since Angus Wilson, there is no writer who has used this tradition, expanding it seriously: recently, the best novel I have read for a long time did so splendidly – but it was written by an Indian from Trinidad (A House for Mr Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul). The picaresque fantasy-novel – didn’t it originate in England? – has lately made a come-back: but in German, with The Tin Drum. The splenetic vein of Wyndham Lewis has dried up; the inheritance of Wells and Huxley is frittered away in the small change of science fiction.

  These are grouses in the she-ain’t-what-she-used-to-be strain. The real gap that I am conscious of in my expropriated literature is the lack of novelist-philosophers. Among my contemporaries in British writing there is a lot of lively blind dissatisfaction – hitting out for the hell of it at telly civilisation or shying (again) at that apparently Welfare State-proof old coconut, the class barrier. From outside, however admirably well done, and sometimes witty, it all seems rather parochial. Then there are the Catholic novelists, from Graham Greene – whose marvellous laconic style, reflecting the profound pessimism that sometimes affects one who knows men to the last cell, makes him appear too unheroic, even in his despair, for greatness – to Muriel Spark, whose dialogue is the first ever to match the telegraphic brilliance of early Waugh, and whose two most recent books seem to indicate that she has chosen for good, the confines of some girls’ institution as her private vision of the world; there are stockings dangling to dry above every page. The only British novelist who is close to being a novelist-philosopher outside the limits of a religious dogma is William Golding. To me he is the most exciting and interesting of contemporary British writers.

  But where is the British equivalent of a Camus – not just the individual genius, but the writer with the sense of the past (unwistfully) and the future (unprophetically) present in himself, and a cool purpose, born of real passion for life, to explore its possibilities at this stage of half-understood, totally threatened human existence?

  1964

  Taking into Account

  Simone de Beauvoir’s Force of Circumstance

  You can seize hold of this final(?) instalment of the autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir and worry away at it from a num
ber of points of view. But which is the one that will yield, wriggling, the individual herself? In the end, what does one make of her? What does she make of herself? To write an autobiography is to sum up: and to read it is to examine the process and arrive at a total of one’s own – never objective, of course, but subject to a set of opinions, prejudices and emotions that differ in kind and/or degree from those of the author. Entertained, appalled (once or twice), irritated (occasionally), enthralled (often), amused (in places where this was not the author’s intention), moved and, above all, compelled to stay with her to the last page. I stand back from volume three and, for me, this life gives purchase most clearly in three aspects and in this order: the experience of being French during the Algerian war; the position of the Leftist outside the Communist Party; woman as intellectual. Here is Simone de Beauvoir.

  Being female was a precondition, yet, in order of importance, I put it third in the forces that have shaped her life because she has dealt with it, in the particular context of that life, successfully – even triumphantly – and in this last volume it crops up more in the light of reflection on these triumphs than in the glare of battle enjoined. I am referring here to the intellectual woman’s problem of being regarded as what Simone de Beauvoir calls a ‘secondary being’ rather than that of being, in the narrowest sense – sexually – a female, and so we can turn a deaf ear to that mournful cry of the ageing woman towards the end of the book: ‘Never again a man!’ Anyway, might it not just as easily come from a man – the cry: ‘Never again a woman!’?

  Intellectual women have, a generation ago at least, disowned the old feminist stand that women are, so to speak, men with frills on. A woman no longer has to see herself emancipated in the image of a man; just as the black man (rather later) no longer sees himself in the image of the white man. Equal but different; that’s not only acceptable, it’s what women want and what we have had ratified (even if the law, opportunity and custom lag behind here and there) by a man’s world. It is a man’s world still, largely because men kept it to themselves so long, and because many women share in common with other oppressed peoples the development of a slave mentality and are the first to turn their red fingernails on their sisters who not only walk out on the seraglio but, worse, refuse the status of ‘honorary males’. (De Beauvoir’s phrase again.) Feminism as such – whether in this negative or in its positive aspects – has become a bore. The attacks on Simone de Beauvoir as a woman after she had published The Second Sex glanced off because she was confident of having no special inadequacies to defend. ‘No; far from suffering from my femininity, I have, on the contrary, from the age of twenty on, accumulated the advantages of both sexes; after She Came to Stay, those around me treated me both as a writer, their peer in the masculine world, and as a woman’ and she adds, ‘Oh how insufferable to the suffragette and the sultan! …at parties I went to the wives all got together and talked to each other while I talked to the men, who nevertheless behaved towards me with greater courtesy than they did towards the members of their own sex’. For a woman as little given to feminine glee as this one, it must take tremendous self-confidence to come out with that – the heady first success of every little small-town intellectual Bovary as well as the experience of the Simone de Beauvoirs and Mary McCarthys.