Nadine Gordimer
Stanley Hermans

At 79 Nadine Gordimer is the perennial babe. Cool, funky, forward-looking, vital and dynamic.
I intend no disrespect, all I’m saying is that the dame is a gent magnet of note up there with Holly Golitely, that other stylish girl. And, like Audrey Hepburn, Gordimer is a UN Goodwill ambassador.

I recently took tea with Nadine Gordimer, and discovered that she has the loveliest mind and keenest wit. Her mind is a sunny place though her heart and soul is currently experiencing stormy weather on account of the recent loss of her great love, Reinhold Cassirer, a deeply respected patron of the arts and art dealer.

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, Johannesburg, South Africa on November 20 1923 to Isidore Gordimer and Nan Myers.

According to Per Wastberg’s candid monograph, “Nadine’s parents were immigrants. Her father was a small town watchmaker and jeweller who sold trophy cups and shooting clubs, as well as engagement rings and canteens of cutlery. He read nothing. Her mother read aloud”.

Q: Could you describe the moment of your being aware that you’d found a medium of expression in words?
A: “No. These moments are imagined upon us writers and artists, by other people. It’s usually the combination of a slow, slow process. In my own case, I couldn’t possibly pick on a moment, because I began to write when I was nine years old.”

Q: What was the first response to the nine year old Nadine’s writing ?
A: “Wasn’t I lucky? Nobody took any notice.”

Q: And at that time could you think of the single most influential voice in your world?
A: “Dr Doolittle. It was a disappointment my children did not respond to Dr Doolittle the way I did. I was a great reader. My mother read to me when I was very small and then from the age of six I was a member of a local municipal library and I read and read and read… I was a child in South Africa and all the books were about somewhere else, related to another extraordinary world outside my own, where Christmas had snow and pictures of robins hopping around.”
As Wastberg said, “Nadine stayed at home more than other girls did, and had lessons from a private tutor for several years. She learned how to interpret subtexts: her mother’s tone of voice, imperfectly hidden secrets, familial hypocracy, the gulf between public behaviour and private reality.”

“I had a sister three years and ten months older than I. No brothers unfortunately.” Gordimer said. “A very female household, just my Papa and my Mother and then the two girls. Now, my passion was dancing, and I showed quite a lot of talent. So, at nine years old, my ambition was to be a ballet dancer, not a writer. But there was a family paper here that had a big double page section for children, and children were invited to send in their own drawings and so on. So I wrote some stories and published two or three of them in this children’s thing.

“When I was fifteen I published my first adult story. This was during the Smuts regime. There was a good sort of liberal journal, a weekly I think it was, I probably saw it in somebody else’s house, but as I said, I read everything.
“When I was thirteen, I saved up my birthday money and bought my first typewriter, which I had for years. And, so obviously I typed out the story having taught myself to type and sent it off to this magazine, and it was duly published, and they didn’t know that I was only fifteen years old.

“Of course, seeing that in print was the biggest thrill of my writing life, it’s never been equalled. And it was at a momentous time, the war broke out in September ’39 and I turned 15 in November, and that’s when the story came out, just as war broke out, but the war meant nothing to me compared with me having my story published”.
In 1991, Gordimer became the first South African writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, the ultimate vindication of her literary greatness.

Q: And you say it’s never been better. A bit inconceivable that a Noble prize winner should drop such a clanger, wouldn’t you say?
A: (Laughter) “No, no, no, no. The Nobel Prize was nothing compared to that. Really, I’m not joking. I think if you’re a child who doesn’t live in an intellectual atmosphere, who doesn’t know anybody who writes, how you come to do that and get published was a most extraordinary thing for me. It was a sort of equal to me critically climbing Mount Everest. So that when this story of mine appeared, then I had the entrée to another world completely. I felt that I wasn’t a kid anymore.”

Q: At which point do you let go of a story?
A: “When it’s published of course. I never show anybody what I’m writing while I write it. Maybe it stems from my childhood, because I didn’t see anybody who would take it seriously or would understand it, or I didn’t want anybody to laugh at it, or whatever. That stayed with me all my life. My husband died last year. We were married for nearly forty-eight years. He totally respected this privacy of mine. When I look back on it I would spend two or three years writing a novel, and were together all the time, and I never showed him one page. I never discussed a narrative with him. He was the first person to read it when it was finished, but only when it was completely finished, and I was satisfied that it was finished, would I show it to him. The same with publishers… no publisher of mine has ever seen one word, until it is finished.”

In 1949 Gordimer married Dr Gerald Gavron, and their daughter Oriane Phoebe was born in 1950. She divorced Gavron in 1952, and in 1953 she published her first novel, ‘The Lying Days’.

In 1954 she became the third wife of Reinhold Cassirer, originally from Heidelberg, Germany. Their son Hugo was born in 1955.

As Gordimer explained: “From 20 to 30 you really are terribly impulsive and wild if you’ve got any spirit in you at all. Or perhaps some people go through that stage earlier.

“I got married, and divorced in ’52. I was living with my little daughter … divorced, no money at all, unbelievably confident that I could manage. All my friends said that you’d better take a job writing advertising copy, you better do this that or the other, but I said no, no, no, I am going to write, I’m going to write my first novel. I’d written a couple of stories which had been published overseas and, of course, if I got $100, I could live on it for three months at that time.
“So I lived very frugally and all my friends were poor as well, so we managed and had quite a lot of fun. And I wrote that novel, “The Lying Days”. I’m now amused to look at the title which comes from Yeats, “through all the lying days of my life I wave my leaves of flowers in the sun now I shall wither into truth”.

Q: What do you do with the sadnesses of life and how do you celebrate the joys?
A: “I can answer the second part of the question first, because I have been someone fortunate enough to have a great deal of joy in my life and I’ve simply enjoyed it, without any sense that I’ve been too much blessed or any reservations of that kind.”

Q: So there is no guilt in the mix…
A: “No. Only guilt in relation to certain things that I’ve done of course. Everybody has that. The sins of omission, I call it, the things I should have done and didn’t do. I think everybody has that; I would be lying if I didn’t say that. That would be my answer to the first part of your question. (Pause) I wish you could tell me how one deals with what is inconsolable, because I can’t seem to find that answer myself.”

Cassirer died in October 2001, aged 93, leaving a void in Gordimer’s life that she obviously feels very deeply.

Q: I can’t help thinking about the notion of healing.
A: “This is where we can go back to the joy. The fact that I lived to see, and take part in the end of Apartheid and the starting, the establishment of a New South Africa, there is a constant joy to me in that. It is something absolutely great, the day in ’94 when we queued up to go and vote for the first time. I will never forget, because who knows, there were times when you thought it would never happen. And I had good friends who were deeply involved in the struggle who were in and out of prison, who really suffered. A lot died for one reason or another, died in exile, or something went wrong. They never lived to see the end, they had virtually given up their lives, their private lives to it.

“To have lived through that and have seen it end, it is something of great satisfaction and joy to me.”
As Anthony Sampson the former Drum editor who has been described as her oldest friend, said in a review of her book “Living in Hope and History”, “Gordimer’s extraordinary consistency and sensitivity through the apartheid years has given her a precious continuity through the country’s discontinuous history, maintaining a golden thread of integrity through all the brutality and hysteria of that time: she kept her head through the ‘collective madness’ as she called it, and distilled her sanity into her novels. Like Mandela on the political front, she provides a crucial link between past and future, through which the New South Africa can see its problems more clearly in a long perspective.”

Q: You once referred to South Africa as the place that owns you.
A: “Oh absolutely, because I have no religion. I’m born a Jew, both my parents were Jewish. My father came from Russia and obviously had a conventional upbringing, but my mother came from England, from a sort of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding kind of upbringing, and she had no religion at all. I know she believed in God, she was not an atheist, but she certainly never went anywhere near a synagogue, so my sister and I had no religious upbringing at all.

“We went to a convent school where when the Catholic children went to Catechism and prayers, we had a much envied free time. When I was in my thirties I went through a time when I felt there might be a kind of lacking in my life so I read the Koran and finally got round to the Bible and the Torah and so on, but I had none of this in my childhood, I approached it as an intellectual way when I was already completely adult. But it didn’t catch on as faith. I found that I could not and never have been able to make the leap into faith.

“To me the spirit is in the body … I look at you now and the spirit is there in your face and in your eyes. The Buddhist idea that you have many lives, that you come back in many forms, this fascinates me. The continuity of life seems to me to be expressed in Buddhism better than in any other religion.”

Q: What would you suggest as a starting point for young people wanting to be writers?
A: “By reading. It is the only, the only training. Reading and you must have a natural talent, however deeply it’s buried. Just as you are not going to become an opera singer if you haven’t have the right vocal cords.

“Many people want to write. Many people want to paint. At different times in my life I did not believe you could teach people to write, but I have been involved in workshops trying to help young people, sometimes not such young people who were aspiring to become writers.

“Of course there is a difference between aspiring to become a writer and wanting to write. Wanting to have the prestige of seeing your name somewhere, that’s one thing you know, but actually having that huge urge to write, that is the real thing. You can’t be taught to write. The only thing that a writers’ workshop and anything of that nature can do for you is to arouse your critical faculties.

“Not to copy, but you see the range of the medium you’ve chosen. You develop a faculty of self-criticism and so you dig deeper into yourself; you set aside the cliché; you realise that the way that you’ve seen the telegraph pole shine in the sun has been described 20 times before and you have to think of something new to do with it.
“And you have to see, you have to be very alert, you have to always be, all your senses alert. You’re watching other people, reading their body language … this must come naturally to you.
“Your ears are always open and you’re always eaves-dropping.
“Graham Green once said, when asked whether his characters were based on real people: ‘You invent alternative lives for people’.
“So I meet you now, and you might tell me where you come from, what you’ve been doing, but then I can invent an alternative life for you. I can make up a story about what happened to you when you came to South Africa and you did this, that and the other.

Q: What license creative people allow themselves!
A: “Oh you have to strive for it, but reading is the base. To read, and to be extremely observant.”
Wastberg, who has been friends with Gordimer for more than 40 years, described life in the Gordimer home: “In Reinhold and Nadine’s home one hears clicks and creaks. But between nine and one silence reigns, for then the lady of the house is in her study. The brown-panelled interior is full to overflowing with books, photographs of children, souvenirs. The eye strays ineluctably over the deposits of a lifetime. Nadine types on an old machine. Thomas silently sets down trays of tea and biscuits for all of us in our different rooms. Reinhold takes the dog for a walk, reads The Star in the garden, listens to the radio. The routine is the same decade after decade: the livelier the imagination, the calmer the daily rhythm.”

Q: It is well known that you are a most disciplined writer.
A: That’s right … I am always amazed that this is regarded by everybody as so extraordinary, and some people are even offended if they can’t just walk in on me, but every businessman has a secretary. You call Mr So and So, the secretary says he is in a meeting and she takes a message, then you hear a Green Sleeves or Joplin or something, you know, and you got to hold on and then you leave your message. So why can’t a writer have a little protection?

“To me titles are terribly important. If I’m writing a story, or beginning a novel, if I don’t have a title, then there is something very wrong. And it is very, very rare for me to change a title because of something that comes up in a text. It’s as if the title compresses, holds everything that is going to be in a story.

“You take a novel of mine “The House Gun”, it’s a very simple title, but it stands for so much, not just for the gun that was in the house, which is very important in the story since it causes all kinds of terrible things to happen, but the fact that it was written at a time when indeed the gun in the house was a very ordinary object.

“It’s like the cat or an ashtray or a bath. It’s something that almost every household has. And why is that? It is all connected with the social problems, those are connected with political problems, and those are connected with the whole apartheid time. So in those three words “The House Gun” is the theme behind the narrative in the novel.

Q: Do these titles pop out as coherent wholes or do you find yourself toying with the possibilities first?
A: “Usually they pop out. Sometimes it causes difficulty. My last novel, as you probably know was called “The Pickup”. Now , it has a double meaning as you know.

Certainly in South Africa “pick-up” is a little bakkie, a little truck that picks things up, but a pick-up is also somebody that you don’t know who you chat up in a bar or in a club or in a train or anywhere. You pick them up and it usually has a sexual connotation. So when it came to translations into French and into German and so on, there is no equivalent, no equivalent at all.”

Gordimer has been described often and variously: “A tiny woman,” writes Diana Loercher, “with the carefully cultivated fierceness of the fragile … she is a commanding, even a theatrical presence. Her features are sharp, her face etched with lines of humour and indignation.”

Lewis Nkosi describes her: “…I return again to that face as it invariably appeared to us in private and on the jackets of her books. It is a small face with the chiselled features of a classical model, a face not so much calm or peaceful as confoundingly tormented and tormenting …”

Q: You have said that sex and politics are the strongest driving forces in life, which I wouldn’t have found remarkable had you not said the ‘strongest’ driving forces.
A: “I’m talking here about love, sexual love, sexual love and politics, because politics became so much a part of the intimate life.

“For instance, I could never imagine at any stage in my life, when I was young or middle-aged or whatever, having any kind of intimate relationship with somebody who didn’t share my horror and revulsion of racism. I could never have lived with that. I could never have had a lover who didn’t share my views about racism. It wouldn’t be possible for me to live with somebody like that.

“I’ve seen this with so many people in South Africa, the whole ‘I’ll let him have his convictions and I have mine’, it doesn’t work. It never works. In the end, the politics interferes with the emotional attachment.
“I suppose I’ve been very fortunate, because the man that I loved and to whom I was married for the greater part of my
live, though I had been briefly married before, shared my political views.
“There was never any question during the bad times, when I was doing something risky, that he could have said, ‘now we’ve got children and you shouldn’t do this’.

He never said that, he always understood and shared in this and said ‘well, okay, we may get into trouble because we are doing this that or the other for so and so’, but he was in it with me.

“Being a real European in the Europe sense, he had a context. I thought that what happened to us in South Africa never happened anywhere else, but he was used to dealing with these situations because he was young in Nazi Germany.
“Of cause when I said kind of boldly the two matters are sex and politics I didn’t mean sex in the way that it is often used. I shudder when I hear people talking about having sex, you don’t have sex the way you eat a piece of bread or catch a cold you know.

Q: How ought people to view that subject? It seems that we have a bit of a romantic notion going here which I think we need to hear about.
A: “It’s something that you do, that you share, you don’t have it on your own. It seems to be demeaning that having sex would apply to be a very narrow part of ife and that it would be a casual one night stand, you know. So the after party is in the back of the car maybe that’s having sex, but that is not sexual love, it’s not the full meaning of what sex can be.”

Q: Your cat is rather famous too, and appears in a short story by Achmat Dangor entitled “Nadine Gordimer’s Cat’. Do you still have that three-legged cat?
A: Oh it’s so sad, you probably saw a big dog when you came in?

Q: Yes?
A: …I’m very much deprived of a cat at the moment.