Writing in battle dress

ANTHOLOGY: MOLLY McCLOSKEYreviews Telling Times: Writing and Living 1950-2008, By Nadine Gordimer, Bloomsbury, 740pp, £35

‘THE MOMENT when I am no longer more than a writer, I shall cease to write.” Nadine Gordimer takes this line from Camus as her credo, adding, “I believe that the writer within integrity to his/her creativity has a responsibility as a human being for recognition of oppression perpetrated against people, whoever they are, in the society in which the writer has his/her being”.

Gordimer was born in 1923 in a gold mining town near Johannesburg, where most girls left school to become clerks or typists before graduating to marriage and babies. Her mother was from England, her father a watchmaker from Lithuania. From the age of 12, Gordimer was writing stories, publishing her first at the age of 15. In 1948, she moved to Johannesburg and five years later published her first novel, The Lying Days. She has since written dozens of works – fiction and essay collections deeply engaged with the political and moral issues of her time and place – and still lives in South Africa. Her novels, two of which were banned there for a decade or more, have won numerous awards. In 1991, she received the Nobel Prize.

Telling Timesbrings together Gordimer's non-fiction from 1950-2008 and is the nearest readers will get to an autobiography. Her disinclination to memoir stems from several impulses. Pointing to a subconscious self-censorship that operates in non-fiction, she insists that the disguise of fiction can encompass all the things that go unsaid between people. As crucial is her unwillingness to be complicit in the way the "official South African consciousness" has been white.

What we get in this collection then is a rich record of the writer’s intellectual and political development, as well as a kind of biography of modern South Africa. The writings take us through the 1950s and the early years of apartheid, to the crackdowns of the 1960s – when many activists ended up in prison or in hiding – to the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s, and through the 1980s, which saw mass protests in the townships, international sanctions, and the beginnings of desegregation. The 1990s opened with the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison, events that preceded the first democratic elections in 1994.

Running parallel to this history – and going beyond it into the early years of the new century – are a number of themes. One is Gordimer’s own growing consciousness of the evil promulgated by the experiment in social engineering that was apartheid. She writes of the “rebirth” that many South African whites experienced. “I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.” It is the discovery of the “great South African lie . . . what was being concealed by my society was that blacks were people . . .”.

For Gordimer, more than a growing awareness of pervasive injustice, it was learning to write that sent her “falling, falling through the surface of ‘the South African way of life’”. Out of this immersion came firm ideas on the relationship between creativity and the writer’s social responsibility.

She was ever aware of the distortions apartheid produced, both in people’s personal lives and in writing: a “cramped and even distorted imagination”; black and white caricatures in fiction; orthodoxies of resistance that tried to curtail creative freedom by insisting that writing serve as propaganda. Even censorship – itself distorting – was applied with a special warp. Some books were banned in paperback but not hardback: affluent whites could be entrusted with works that questioned the system, while poor blacks (who would buy the paperbacks) could not.

ONE OF THE RICHEST PIECES in the book is ‘Living in the Interregnum’ (1981), which reflects the energy and suspense of the moment. “I live at 6,000 feet in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change. The vision is heady; the image of the demonic dance is accurate, not romantic: an image of actions springing from emotion, knocking deliberation aside. The city is Johannesburg, the country South Africa, and the time the last years of the colonial era in Africa”.

It is, like the book’s best essays, both impassioned and coolly analytical. Even in her earliest work, Gordimer wrote with an air of authority. (On a trip on the Congo river in 1961, she says of unflattering observations: “These are not sneers but facts”.) Though she is careful about the intrusion of “events personally experienced”, there is no doubt that there is a fire in the apartheid-era writings that comes from ardent convictions crashing against daily life; by comparison, the later pieces on such topics as globalisation and poverty can feel theoretical and a little disembodied.

Gordimer often addresses the question of how politically engaged writers will fare in a changed context. Her spirited answer: “Only those who jumped on the anti-apartheid and anti-communist bandwagons, having nothing in their baggage but the right clichés, will lose their dubious inspiration . . .”. The real writers will have the less sensational but daunting task of learning to deal with themes that were sidelined “while writing was in battle dress . . . human consciousness in all its mystery”.

There are book reviews and incisive analyses of the work of numerous writers – Paz, Hemingway, Proust, Flaubert, Tolstoy, William Plomer, Alan Paton, Edward Said, Conrad, Achebe, Philip Roth, Rushdie, Joseph Roth, Kenzaburo Oe, Patrick White, Wole Soyinka, Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, Albert Memmi, Naguib Mahfouz and others – as well as pieces on activists and friends such as Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Milosz and Kundera are guiding spirits throughout.

Women are conspicuous by their absence. Woolf, Didion, Carson McCullers, Mary McCarthy and Toni Morrison are mentioned only in passing. There are three pages on Susan Sontag. Otherwise, aside from a 1966 piece on Simone de Beauvoir and one from 1980 on the writer Olive Schreiner, who died in 1920, Gordimer does not seriously engage with another female writer or thinker.

That aside – and it's a curious that – Telling Timesis a book that hits the reader with the full force of Gordimer's intellectual and moral commitment. One has the sense of a writer with a sweeping view who is yet capable of tracking individual lives. In an interview, she suggested that such was the service writers were able to perform during apartheid – showing people both inside and outside South Africa what the system really meant in human terms: a total invasion of people's lives. Of her own role, she said: "I've never thought I could – or wanted to – teach anybody anything. I just wanted to show what was there."

Molly McCloskey is a novelist and short story writer, and the current Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. From 2006-2008, she worked for the Kenya-based UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia