Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  This is the search for Zaabalawi.

  In his short story of that name the genius of Naguib Mahfouz sends a man to seek the saintly sheikh, Zaabalawi; everywhere to find always he has just missed the one who has the answer to the questions of being, personal, political, social, religious – the inward testimony. Zaabalawi knows the human mystery is revealed not alone in high places – he frequents Cairo bars, and the man is told he will be found at a particular haunt. Wearily waiting there for hours, the man falls asleep. When he wakes he finds his head is wet; others in the bar tell him Zaabalawi came while he was sleeping and sprinkled water on him to refresh him. Having had this sign of Zaabalawi’s existence, the man will go on searching for him all his life – ‘Yes, I have to find Zaabalawi.’ Yes, we writers have to find the inward testimony our calling, literature, demands of us.

  A writer who did is Naguib Mahfouz.

  In Khufu’s Wisdom, an early novel in which Mahfouz’s brilliant creativity was already evident, Pharaoh Khufu leaves the palaces of worldly power and takes to the pyramid he had built as his tomb; there, he has decided to write ‘a great book guiding the souls and protecting the people’s bodies with knowledge’.

  Naguib Mahfouz has drunk the cup and gone, leaving us behind in the shabby grim presence of worldly power, but he’s left his wisdom, his writings, his inward testimony, the wisdom of great literature.

  2006

  Desmond Tutu As I Know Him

  I am an atheist. But if anyone could have launched me into the leap of a religious faith – any denomination – it would have been Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Being so respectful of others’ rights, even those of unbelief, he has never tried, on the occasions in my life when I have turned to him for personal but secular counsel. I am a Jew; for me, to be born Jew as to be born black are existential states not religiously determinate, and neither a matter for pride or shame, whatever the world tries to make of this. We are simply of the great human tribe.

  If Desmond hasn’t caused by his matchless example as a man of faith to lead me to find my own humble way to one, he certainly has influenced my life. Truly vitally, in the complex and often confusing, dismaying choice of reactions and attitudes called upon for response in the second half of the twentieth century and the new millennium in our country, South Africa.

  First impressions: he is not a man of whom that of one’s first meeting is going to have to be revised as one gets to know him. He has no façade. The open interest, the fellow warmth that radiate from him then are what he is. As he has risen to the Himalayas of public life, become world famous, this hasn’t been blunted in any way. I’d call his lack of self-consciousness one of his inherent gifts; the others have been developed by the exercise of character, the spiritual and intellectual muscle-building he has subjected and continues to subject himself to in service of the human congregation. He’s taken on no less than that.

  His playfulness I recognised early as deeply serious. When he danced down the aisle after giving his sermon during our worst of times, it was not to be dutifully seen as symbiosis of conventional Christian forms of worship and traditional African forms. It was the assertion of sacred joy in life, the unquenchable force that no apartheid oppression could get at within people.

  His playfulness was serious, for all of us; his sense of humour was directed often against himself.

  He won’t mind if I have my particular memory of the splendid occasion when my husband Reinhold Cassirer and I were fortunate to be invited to the ordination of Desmond Tutu as Bishop of Johannesburg. We sat in St Mary’s Cathedral following the ceremonial process, the display of robed dignitaries, our spirits uplifted by the choir and awaiting in anticipation the speech of the newly mitred bishop. Such ceremonies are transformational; the individual enters with one public identity and emerges with another, whether the endowing authority is a religious one, such as this occasion, or a secular one, the induction of a president. Bishop Desmond Tutu smiled, but not down, on us all as if we’d just arrived at the door of his house in Orlando. After the formal acknowledgement to those who had received him into high office, he told us, ‘In our hotel this morning Leah said, I’ve woken up in bed with a bishop!’

  Anti-apartheid activities brought me into contact with Bishop Tutu in the years that were to come. The recognition he gave to the smallest effort as much as the largest initiative against the dehumanising apartheid regime made me aware of hasty judgemental dismissals I held against the effectiveness not only of some others, but of my own efforts. His own boldness was never punitive; the power he always has had is to make it impossible for any group, any formation, any persons not to recognise their responsibility for what they do to demean and brutalise others.

  What is a man of the world? What do we mean by that designation? Usually it implies sophistication, a certain easy ambiguity in matters of money, friendships and sexual love. Desmond Tutu is not morally ambiguous in any of those designations. But he has shown me there is another definition to be entered in the human dictionary. He is a man of the world in a different way.

  We had a parental bond in that our sons, his Trevor and our Hugo, were schoolmates at Waterford-Kamhlaba School in Swaziland. As it turned out, there came another bond in our personal concern about a mutual friend, one both respected and highly expected – by those of us looking ahead, then, to who would take leadership positions after the end of apartheid – as a young man qualified by courage, intelligence and integrity in the liberation movement. The secret love affair of the man was suddenly no secret. It was news, printed in and heard on the media. When I came to Desmond with my concern that what was to me a private matter, as the law provides, between consenting adults, was being regarded as a betrayal of political morality and integrity, I was very uncertain of what Desmond’s attitude would be.

  I found in him analysis and understanding of human sexuality. Not a judgement of its urges as sin. An acceptance that the unfortunate occurrence of submitting to such an urge while this causes pain and betrayal in the context of marriage, responsibility for which cannot be denied, must be borne; in the nature of humankind the happening is not decisive in the complete character of the individual. Desmond Tutu didn’t give in to disappointment in the behaviour of the individual, I think, because in his fearless dedication to truth he allows himself no illusions. He did not condemn; he said he wished the man had come to him. I do not know what he would have done for him; I only know the capacity Desmond Tutu has to make one deal with oneself.

  Came the 1980s and a crisis in the milieu of the Congress of South African Writers, of which I was among the founders. The Congress had for some hard years proved itself in actions to defend freedom of expression, not alone against the banning of books but in support of those of us who were detained, arrested on treason charges, their typewriters seized, their employment as teachers, journalists, forbidden. With our extremely limited funds, we hired legal representatives for them, alerted the world to the enforced stifling of their talent and had examples of their banned writings published abroad. But the political attitude towards the efficacy of what might be called fringe movements against apartheid, movements in the arts, was changing. The black consciousness movement was in the forefront of the growing decision that any cooperation with whites, whatever their anti-apartheid record short of underground revolutionary activity, ran counter to the apparent evidence that such concessions were part of the failure of liberalism to deliver the goods – freedom could be grasped only by black solidarity in all aspects of public life. Our Congress was headed by a black president, our editorial board and trustees were black and white Africans who were close as colleagues and comrades who trusted one another in common cause. But the pressure on the black writers was strong; they withdrew from the Congress and the choice was to carry on as a white organisation or close down. There was anger among some white members; they wanted to continue as such. For myself, I saw that the move on the part of our president and other black colleagues was necessary at this u
rgent final phase in the freedom impetus, psychologically and tactically. But I felt abandoned, confused; if I could have no part as a writer in the freedom movement in which I was active in other ways, as a citizen, my usefulness seemed truncated.

  I went to Desmond. He is such a good listener. You don’t sense him having snap reactions, making judgements, while you come to him in the full tide of your problems. He wants all the details, even those you think don’t matter; he knows better. He is the man of wholeness. I wish I could recall his exact flow of words. He told me that my position was not useless. It was the right one; on the one hand I recognised the need for those blacks who saw withdrawal from white cooperation as necessary to go it alone, to attain freedom; on the other hand I had taken my right to refuse to belong to a segregated organisation. That was my usefulness to the freedom movement. With this counsel I was enabled without any resentment to continue the personal relations my black writer comrades never ceased to maintain with me.

  Desmond Tutu’s supreme achievement so far has been the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That scarcely requires stating. I recall what I wrote near the beginning of the chance to pay tribute: ‘His boldness was never punitive; the power he has always had is to make it impossible for any persons not to recognise their responsibility for what they do to demean and brutalise others.’ Was this not the principle of the Commission? Its faith? It did not offer dispensation for confession but reconciliation with the victim by total public admittance of responsibility for terrible acts committed. A much more difficult attempt at resolution of crimes against humanity than a Nuremberg. The truth is harsh, shocking, terribly wonderful: Desmond has never accepted the evasion that truth is relative, for himself. At the Commission I understood that he extended that ultimate condition to our people and our country as the vital necessity for living together in survival of the past. The acceptance of that, he has taught, has to come from within.

  When placing the TRC as his greatest achievement I added the proviso ‘so far’. Desmond Tutu continues to be a bold and zestful force in our society, our country, completely unfazed if the convictions his human conscience and care demand, mean that his interventions may be unwelcome to the government. He gives his full support in the many initiatives it takes to create fulfilment of the needs of a free people still feeling the wounds of the past. But the other honest test of loyalty to a regime surely is to have the guts (Desmond often favours colloquial language!) to speak out when its actions are deficient. A vital example is his outspokenness on the devastation of HIV/Aids among our people and its consequences for the country’s development. He has not been afraid to come forth and say that the level of official response, turning away from leadership of the tremendous effort needed to combat the threat, is low and seems deliberately blinkered. Whatever else happens in our country that may require to be faced by us without compromising the truth, Desmond Tutu certainly will be there to turn us towards problems we have to solve if we care for one another and our country. I know it’s been a blessing for me – from whatever chance or good source that directs human destinies – to have lived along his seventy-five years in the same time and the same country as this splendid life-enhancing personality.

  Tutu.

  2006

  Lust and Death

  Philip Roth’s Everyman

  Nor dread nor hope attend/A dying animal …/Man has created death.

  Philip Roth quotes not these lines from Yeats but those of Keats as epigraph to his latest novel: ‘Here where men sit and hear each other groan;/Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;/Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.’

  For three of the world’s best novelists, Fuentes, García Márquez and Roth, the violent upsurge of sexual desire in the face of old age is the opposition of man to his own creation, death.

  The final kick of the prostate, my old physician friend called it. But it cannot be summed up, so wryly and glibly, when it is the theme of contemporary fiction by these writers from the two Americas. García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Fuentes’s Inez, Roth’s Human Stain and The Dying Animal and now Everyman have in common in their wonderful transformations the phenomenon – presented as similar to that of adolescence – of late sexual desire. The last demanding exuberance in the slowly denuded body, when ‘to think is to be full of sorrow’: the doubt that comes about the unquestioned superiority of the rewards of the intellect. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal claims the phenomenon as the undeniable assertion of ‘erotic birthright’, and this holds good for Philip Roth’s unnamed – perhaps because he is, Roth forces us to admit – Everyman.

  His story begins when he is dead. But we recognise him immediately: he’s in a cultural profession (if a doubtful one), advertising, with an avocation as an amateur painter; he’s been married several times; he has adult progeny with whom he is in various states of lack of relationship. He’s the man Roth has long chosen to take on our human burdens, as a writer has always to select particular beings from among us for attention. The Cultural Journalist in the grave has been a resident in a retirement village for several years before his death. The relatives, an ex-wife, etc., are at the graveside. It has been the decision of his most-loved child, Nancy, to bury him in a half-abandoned Jewish cemetery although she knows he was an atheist: he loved his parents and he will be close to them in their graves.

  Roth takes the writer’s free acknowledgement of many literary modes while unceasingly experimenting with his own. From the graveside nod to Dickens, the man unseen there is tracked back to life and even before his individual conception. Here, the chronology of living isn’t that of a calendar but of cross-references; soon we’re at an earlier graveside. After a re-creation of the Cultural Journalist’s childhood as he waits for one of the medical ‘interventions’ that maintain his geriatric body, he turns back the pages of self to the day of his father’s funeral. It is in the same cemetery, the old Jewish one founded by immigrants. That day, as he watches, his father’s jewellery store is vividly present. It opened in 1933 with an immigrant’s audacity as the only capital: ‘Diamonds – Jewelry – Watches’. In order to ‘avoid alienating or frightening away the port city’s tens of thousands of churchgoing Christians with his Jewish name, he extended credit freely … he never went broke with credit, and the goodwill generated by his flexibility was more than worth it’. A good man, as his son recognises.

  Perhaps it’s possible to be good only in a life with a number of limitations? So much is intriguing, left for the reader to ask himself or herself in Roth’s writings. The reason to risk opening a store in the bad times of the Depression ‘was simple’: he ‘had to have something to leave my two boys’. This, in Roth’s context, is not sentimental; it’s an unstated principle of survival with connotations waking the reader to the unending presence of the immigrant, generation after generation, country to country, Jew, Irishman, Muslim, no roots but shallow ones scratched into someone else’s natal soil.

  If descriptive amplitude went out with the nineteenth century, Philip Roth, who strides the whole time and territory of the word, has resuscitated it – in description revved with the power of narrative itself. This father’s graveside is – for the canny reader, not the son – a post-premonitory experience, intended to lead back to the graveside at which Roth chose to begin the son’s life, a tug at the lien between the son and his antecedents ignored by him. He has never before witnessed the Jewish Orthodox ritual whereby the mourners and not the cemetery professionals literally bury the coffin. What he sees is not a symbolic sprinkling of a handful of dust, but the relatives and friends heaving shovels of earth to thud on the coffin, filling the hole to obliteration. As he becomes ‘immersed in the burial’s brutal directness’ what comes to him is not reverence but horror. ‘All at once he saw his father’s mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up his mouth, bl
inding his eyes, clogging his nostrils and closing off his ears … He could taste the dirt coating the inside of his mouth well after they had left the cemetery and returned to New York.’ The taste of death.

  ‘Professor of Desire’. One may so name Philip Roth, writer, without disrespect and in admiration, with an epithet that was the title of one of his earlier novels. Roth has proved by the mastery and integrity of his writing the difference between the erotic and the pornographic, in our sleazy era of the latter. The premise of his work is that nothing the body offers is denied so long as it does not cause pain. With rather marvellous presumption he seems unknowingly to have written the Kama Sutra of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He asserts the joy of loving sexual intercourse, the splendid ingenuity of the body. His men are not disciples of de Sade, though it may be difficult to accept (in The Dying Animal) the man licking a woman’s menstrual blood off her legs as not exploitation of the privacy of a bodily function, quite different from the evocation of ‘the simplicity of physical splendor’ which is manifest in sexual desire, and beautifully celebrated for all of us in his latest novel.

  If Portnoy has never been outgrown, only grown old, he is, in his present avatar, an everyman whose creator makes the term ‘insight’ something to be tossed away as inadequate. What Roth knows of the opposition/apposition of the body and the intellect is devastatingly profound and cannot be escaped, just as Thomas Mann’s graffiti on the wall of the twentieth century cannot be washed off: ‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ Roth has dealt with this other great theme in human existential drives – politics – as searchingly as he has sexuality. Roth’s people, whether politically activist or not, live in our world – and the bared-teeth decorum of academe is its gowned microcosm – terrorised by fear of the Other abroad and state authoritarianism at the throat at home. His superbly matchless work, The Plot Against America, has the power of political fantasy moving out of literature into the urgent possibilities of present-day reality. With that novel he conveyed the Then in the Now. Hero-worship of Charles Lindbergh makes it feasible that he becomes President of the United States, despite his admiring embrace of Hitler; Bush never embraced Nazis, but the enthusiasm he elicits, through instilling fear in Americans who voted him into power and whose sons have come back in body bags along with the gruesome images of Iraqi dead, is no fantasy. And Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism foreshadows the fundamentalisms that beset us in 2006.