In July 2007, South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was one of the main attractions at Latin America's largest literary festival, the Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty (FLIP), in Brazil. I had been invited to chair her conversation with Israeli novelist Amos Oz, a long-time friend of hers. The then-editor of my newspaper's weekend supplement commissioned an interview with Gordimer, who had just launched her collection of short stories, "Beethoven was One-Sixth Black". It was meant to appear in the newspaper's regular lunch-time interview slot.
The interview took place, though—as my text explains—not under the planned circumstances. Gordimer was a formidable interviewee, and the encounter revealed much of the steely determination for which she was so well-known. A pile-up of editorial deadlines (and the editor's feeling that the interviewee and I had strayed from the brief by skipping lunch altogether) led to the piece never being published. Until now.
Reviewing the tributes that have appeared since Gordimer's death last week, I was reminded of our rocky meeting years ago. As I re-read my write-up of the interview, I was struck by how many of the remarkable qualities she is rightly lauded for—her principled determination to stand up against oppression in all its forms, her unforgiving intelligence, her bone-dry humour—were so obviously on display in the course of our conversation.
Below is my previously unpublished write-up of that encounter.
My plans for lunch with Nadine Gordimer, South Africa’s Nobel laureate, have gone awry. We are in Parati, a colonial seaside town on Brazil’s Emerald Coast, south of Rio de Janeiro. Gordimer is here to take part in the fifth edition of the Festa Literária Internacional de Parati, Latin America’s most prestigious literary festival. Her Brazilian publishers have booked a table for us at a fine local restaurant.
The time of our appointment comes. There is no sign of my prospective lunch-mate. Then word comes from an embarrassed Brazilian publicist: Gordimer and her travelling companion, daughter Oriane, are on one of the nearby beaches sipping caipirinhas. I’ve been stood up.
After some scurrying, another encounter is set up for the following day. Gordimer, I’m told, has agreed to have tea at her hotel, an eighteenth-century mansion on the town’s tree-lined main square—currently invaded by giant papier mâché effigies of literary characters, part of the parallel children’s festival.
This time she arrives on cue, refreshed after an earlier boat trip to one of the hundreds of islands that dot the bay. She is wearing white linen trousers and a purple and pink striped tunic. I have reserved a quiet room at the back of the hotel, but she is determined to get on with our business. “What’s wrong with doing it here?” she asks, pointing at a sitting area near the busy reception. I ask for tea to be brought to us there instead.
The grand lady of South African letters, now 84 years old, is surprisingly small. Her hands are curled and mottled with age. Her silver hair is pulled back into a tight bun. There is a timeless, patrician beauty to her face: sharp features, thin lips and alert eyes.
I apologise as I fumble with the tape-recorder. “I never do interviews without one,” she tells me. “I like to be responsible for what I said, not for what the person thinks I’ve said.” Wariness of journalists, she adds, comes from a long experience of being misquoted.
She seems in good spirits, buoyed by the standing ovation she received the previous evening, when she appeared on stage with Israeli novelist Amos Oz to discuss the writer’s role in a divided society. Now she is eager to talk about her latest book, a collection of short stories called Beethoven was One Sixteenth Black.
It is Gordimer’s 18th volume of short stories—she has also published 14 novels and several books of essays. Does writing get any easier, I ask? “I suppose so. But then you take on more difficult things. So you’re always climbing that mountain.”
She’s been climbing that mountain since her debut novel, The Lying Days (1953), a coming-of-age story set in the mining town of Springs, Gordimer’s place of birth. It charts a girl’s growing awareness of the racial cleft underpinning all aspects of life in her country.
This sharp awareness of the moral corruption bred by racial segregation has distinguished Gordimer’s fiction—and informed her political activism. In novels like The Conservationist (for which she shared the 1974 Booker prize) and Burger’s Daughter she dramatises lives touched by discrimination, and shaped by the struggle against the apartheid regime. Some of her books were banned in South Africa, even as her reputation grew abroad—she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
Then, in 1994, came the country’s first multi-racial elections, and the official end of apartheid. The great chronicler of South Africa’s moral dilemmas turned her attention to the more conventional problems that afflict developing countries—violence, immigration and environmental disaster. Did apartheid’s aberrations, I wonder, give her earlier fiction a moral urgency, and a heightened dramatic tension?
She becomes agitated: “People have this idea that apartheid was a subject. Journalists ask me and other South African writers, now that apartheid has gone and you’ve lost your subject, what are you going to write about? When Nazism ended in Germany, what did people write about?”
A waiter brings an assortment of teabags and infusions. He sets a bone china tea-set on the low table beside us. I offer to pour. “I’m sorry, I don’t want any tea,” Gordimer says.
“To me there are two great fundamental motivations in life—sex and politics. Very often in my work they come together.” This latest collection of short stories shows that, even putting politics aside, she continues to write about the intricacies of sex and love with uncanny sharpness.
How does she know when an idea will work as a short story, or when it will extend into a novel? “A story comes to me like an egg: a yolk, surrounded by the white, contained in a shell. I know exactly how it’s going to end before I’ve written the first word. A novel is something into which you keep pouring your solitude.”
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The title of Gordimer’s latest collection is taken from the book’s opening story. Its protagonist is a recently divorced white man bent on finding relatives among the black community in a mining town where his grandfather prospected for diamonds. She explains: “It’s almost become fashionable among people on the left, or among whites who were part of the freedom struggle, to say ‘My great, great grandmother was Xhosa, or Zulu’”.
“Once there were blacks, poor devils, wanting to claim white,” says a line in the story. “Now there’s a white, poor devil, wanting to claim black. It’s the same secret.” Has one form of racial prejudice replaced another in the new South Africa? “But that’s not prejudice,” Gordimer replies, “it’s a desire to belong, my dear.”
She herself does not belong to the white Afrikaner minority that imposed racial segregation. Her father was a Latvian Jew who mended watches. Her mother, a middle-class English Jew whose parents moved to South Africa to hunt for diamonds. “My father was very much dominated by my mother, and indeed she despised the wretched background he came from.”
We discuss Tolstoy’s famous line about all happy families being alike, and all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. “I didn’t belong to a happy family, but I’ve seen them in others. In a way the unhappy family, especially if there is dissension between parents, is good for people who are going to be artists.”
About her own family she is fiercely private, and has said repeatedly that she will never write a book of memoirs. She is still smarting from the publication of a biography by Ronald Suresh Roberts. Once Gordimer’s authorised biographer, Roberts was given unprecedented access to her papers, to her friends and relatives. But he breached her trust, Gordimer felt, by exposing unflattering material taken from her personal correspondence (including, for instance, her cutting remarks about this year’s Nobel laureate, Doris Lessing). The biography was pulled in the US and Britain, but published in South Africa.
I gesture towards our tea, but Gordimer ignores my invitation, so instead I bring up an unlikely character in her fiction—the story “Tape Measure” is narrated by a tapeworm. “I was amused by the idea that our bodies can be hosts to something which ends up in the shit. There were all sorts of analogies with individuals living off each other. You see it all the time. At least I do.”
I want to know about one of the more intriguing pieces in her book, “Dreaming of the Dead”. Less a short story than a fond re-imagining of some of Gordimer’s closest friends, all now dead, it features the Palestinian critic Edward Said, British journalist Anthony Sampson, and American writer Susan Sontag. They join the narrator for an argumentative dinner in a New York Chinese restaurant. It is contrived (as all dream sequences are), funny and poignant.
“It’s my homage to them. If I were a composer I’d have written a piece of music. But I have to use words. So that story comes from very deep in my own life.” The Chinese restaurant is the very one in SoHo where Sontag repeatedly took Gordimer for meals, and where waiters knew what she would order. “Susan was a great eater.”
What they all had in common, I suggest, was an uncompromising commitment to truth. “Not only truth. They were also immensely gifted as writers. And as thinkers. They were good people. They are related existentially to me, both in our work and in our politics.”
The story is touchingly addressed to another dinner guest who never arrives. “It’s my man, my dead husband,” she says, referring to her second husband Reinhold Cassirer, who died in 2001. Throughout our conversation there is the melancholy feeling that, where those dearest to her are concerned, the deceased outnumber the living. “I live in a large house that once contained the whole family, but in which I now live alone.”
Recently, Gordimer has campaigned to raise awareness of South Africa’s AIDS epidemic, and criticised president Thabo Mbeki’s stance on the issue. I ask if she is disappointed by the current government’s policies. “I certainly don’t feel let down because I am an optimistic realist. Wonderful things have been done. We must start with our new constitution which is one of the best in the world. We’ve not even had a generation since 1994. In Europe they’ve had hundreds of years to establish democracy, and they still have poverty and an underclass.” South Africa’s greatest problems at present—AIDS and unemployment—have been, she says, “exacerbated now that we have millions of refugees from wars in Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Mozambique.”
On the square outside the hotel, a popular Brazilian rapper is playing loudly for an audience of children, and I sense our time may be up. I ask Gordimer about contemporary South African writers she is interested in. It is a leading question —the other South African novelist attending the festival is JM Coetzee, with whom she has a frosty relationship.
“André Brink is a good friend of mine,” she replies. “He and I are the only two white writers to have books banned—he had one book banned, I had three.” But the really exciting developments, she says, are occurring in the world of theatre.
Isn’t it extraordinary, I ask bluntly, that this small coastal town in Brazil has hosted South Africa’s two literary giants over the past few days? What does she think of her fellow Nobel laureate? “He’s a wonderful writer. Politically we are completely apart. But as you know,” she says, referring to Coetzee’s recent adoption of Australian citizenship, “he’s no longer a South African.” The message is clear: South Africa has only one Nobel laureate for literature.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have lunch with you yesterday,” she says, getting up. “I needed to rest.” Then, on her way out: “Don’t lose that tape.” I help myself to lukewarm tea.
