Nadine Gordimer

South African writer

• Born: November 20, 1923
• Birthplace: Springs, Transvaal, South Africa
• Died: July 13, 2014
• Place of death: Johannesburg, South Africa

Through her writings, Gordimer illuminated the troubled history of South Africa with unparalleled clarity, sensitivity, honesty, and art. Her achievements were honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991.

Early Life

The father of Nadine Gordimer (GOHR-dih-mur) was an impoverished watchmaker who emigrated from Lithuania to Springs, a small mining town on the East Rand about thirty miles from Johannesburg, South Africa, shortly before the Boer Wars. Her mother was born and grew up in London. Although both parents were Jewish, Gordimer and her only sibling, an elder sister, were sent to a local convent school run by Dominican nuns; the family had little involvement with the local Jewish community. Her father benefited from the increasing prosperity of the town and became the proprietor of a jewelry store, thus securing a middle-class living for his family. Gordimer’s father had no interest in civic affairs, but her mother took an active role in the community, particularly associating with the Scots Presbyterians. In an essay recalling her childhood, Gordimer describes the strange landscape of the East Rand, the richest gold-mining region in the world. It is a bleak and eerie scene with its human-made mountains of waste material, cyanide sand hills, and smoldering coal dust dumps. The town was equally barren, causing Gordimer to observe: “We children simply took it for granted that beauty—hills, trees, buildings of elegance—was not a thing to be expected of ordinary, everyday life.”

Not only was Gordimer’s environment strange, but also her childhood was unusual. Between ages eleven and sixteen she was kept out of school and from participation in normal activities by her mother, who became convinced that Gordimer had a serious heart condition, a condition that Gordimer subsequently learned was a very minor ailment. Although she was sent to a tutor for three hours a day, her contacts with others her own age were severed. Her sister went away to the university, which left Gordimer as constant companion of her parents, particularly of her mother, who took Gordimer with her everywhere. Socializing only with adults in a world of tea parties and trivia, Gordimer became, as she said, “a little old woman.” In her isolation and loneliness, she retreated into herself, read voraciously, and thereby discovered an alternative world more to her liking, the world of ideas.

Although Gordimer attended Witwatersrand University for one year at age twenty-one, she largely educated herself. In 1948, she moved to Johannesburg, which remained her home until her death in 2014. Through her early and, as she acknowledged, indiscriminate reading (devouring children’s books and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, with equal enjoyment), she prepared herself to be a writer. Perhaps Gordimer would have become a writer even without her unusual childhood. Her interest in reading and writing predated her illness; in fact, she wrote her first poem at age nine. There is little doubt, however, that her enforced isolation accelerated the process. At age thirteen, she began writing for the children’s page of the Johannesburg Sunday Express. At fifteen, she published her first short story in The Forum, a South African journal. In 1949, her first volume of short stories, Face to Face , was published in South Africa. The following year, she began publishing stories in the New Yorker, and soon thereafter, her writing began appearing in other American journals, such as Virginia Quarterly Review and the Yale Review. Her first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953. By that time, she had married, divorced, and had an eighteen-month-old daughter, Oriane, to support. In 1954 Gordimer married Reinhold Cassirer, an art dealer. They had one son, Hugo.

Her early short stories, those written before 1953, focus on the daily lives of the poor, white class and show little political consciousness. In fact, Gordimer acknowledges that her full awareness of black Africans and their paradoxical position in their own country (particularly after the Afrikaner Nationalist government assumed power in 1948 and instituted its repressive apartheid laws) developed with incredible slowness. Perhaps this is unsurprising considering the life she led among white middle-class colonials, whose very existence depended on the pretense that blacks do not exist, except as a permanent underclass of servants and laborers. Yet, the politics of South Africa, particularly its apartheid and censorship laws, became the central concern of her writing and of her life. Her writing constitutes a merciless scrutiny of that society and of her own developing consciousness and role within that society.

Life’s Work

During her year at the University of Witwatersrand, Gordimer met for the first time white people (writers, painters, and actors) who defied the color bar and associated with black Africans. This was the beginning of her political education, although she was still not interested in politics. Her attitude at this time was humanistic, individualistic, and optimistic: “I felt all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the color bar. In other words my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action.” It seemed to her that an “inevitable historical process” was taking place that eventually would demolish racial barriers, an attitude reflected in both of her novels of this period, The Lying Days and A World of Strangers (1958). The hope of ending apartheid by personal relationships across the color bar became much more difficult to sustain following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and the subsequent draconian measures against black South Africans initiated by the government: prohibition of all right to peaceful protest and banning of the best black writers. She later joined the African National Congress, a banned organization, and helped its leaders escape arrest. Gordimer’s next two novels, Occasion for Loving (1963) and The Late Bourgeois World (1966), reflect the paralysis and frustration that she undoubtedly felt. Her characters seem unable to act, unable to connect with people and situations, and unable to do more than observe and record.

A Guest of Honour (1970) and the novels that followed revealed Gordimer exploring alternatives to the failed Forsterian liberal humanism. Ultimately, she found it necessary to give up her identification with white European culture in favor of an African-centered consciousness, a change in perspective that resulted in her new, unorthodox definition of African literature: work by those “of whatever skin color who share with Africans the experience of having been shaped, mentally and spiritually, by Africa rather than anywhere else in the world.” In apartheid-era South Africa, where literature and culture were regarded as the exclusive property of an educated, white, European-centered minority, such a definition had revolutionary implication.

The shift from Eurocentric to African culture was a seemingly liberating one for Gordimer. In her fiction, she developed greater freedom in form and style (for example, her use of multiperspective narration) and in content a broader, more diverse cast of characters, including many black South Africans and Indians. At the same time that she became interested in African culture, she also became convinced that “inspirational” literature was superior to the ironical or the satirical, and this seemed to make some difference in the tone of her writing. Although most critics praised her scrupulous powers of observation and analysis, a frequent criticism of her fiction was that it lacked warmth and feeling. Some critics speculated that the cool detachment of her earlier fiction was a consequence of the political situation in South Africa itself, which “’dehumanises’ even the artist.” Her novels Burger’s Daughter (1979) and July’s People (1981) impressed even her sterner critics with their warmth, energy, and commitment.

The relationship between literature and politics is a subject to which Gordimer has necessarily given considerable thought, and her views are complex. She has stated unequivocally the two absolutes in her life.

[O]ne is that racism is evil . . . and no compromises, as well as sacrifices, should be too great in the fight against it. The other is that a writer is a being in whose sensibility is fused . . . the duality of inwardness and outside world, and he must never be asked to sunder this union.

On one hand, she believed that “art is on the side of the oppressed,” and she called on the South African writer, whether black or white, to be a revolutionary as well as a prophet. On the other hand, she remained wary of the writer as proselytizer and the ways that art can deteriorate into propaganda. A writer has the freedom not to write propaganda, even for the “right” cause. She believed that a writer must confront the reader with a situation in such a way that he can no longer ignore it. Ultimately, her view of the writer’s responsibility was paradoxical: The writer must at the same time stand apart and also be fully involved. It is the tension that arises from this objective/subjective vision that makes a writer, according to Gordimer.

Gordimer regarded herself as intensely loyal to South Africa, her home. During the long years of apartheid, she conceded that life in Europe would have been more comfortable for her, but she remained in South Africa, where she courageously continued to attack the twin evils of racism and censorship. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her Nobel diploma praised her “magnificent epic prose” for being “of very great benefit to humanity.”

In her postapartheid novels, Gordimer examined the relation among races and the political roles in a swiftly changing society. The House Gun (1998) is the story of a white couple, both professionals, who must confront the underlying violence and racism persisting in South Africa after learning that their own son has been accused of committing murder. They are appalled when he refuses to deny the charge, and they must face their own deep-seated biases when they discover that a relatively inexperienced black lawyer will defend him. Through their son, the couple is forced to look past their well-intentioned, liberal optimism about their country and past their assumption of their beloved son’s goodness. In The Pickup (2001), Gordimer examined the marriage between a white South African woman and an Arab guest worker. At first he is out of place and vulnerable, but their roles reverse when he is forced to return to his Arab homeland and she is the one who must adapt; she succeeds and finds peace, even after her husband abandons her there. Get a Life (2005) concerns an environmental activist fighting to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant while he himself is undergoing radiation therapy for thyroid cancer, which, when it makes him temporarily radioactive, brings trouble to his own loved ones at home. The novel underscores the difficult, sometimes superficially ironical disparities between public activism and personal life. In 2012 she published No Time Like the Present (2012), a novel about characters who fought against apartheid only to face new challenges in postapartheid South Africa.

Gordimer wrote over twenty short story collections, including Loot and Other Stories (2003); Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007); and Life Times: Stories, 1952–2007 (2010). Her essay collections include What Happened to the Burger's Daughter or How South African Censorship Works (1980); The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places (1988); Living in Hope and History (1999), Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008 (2010), and Life Times: Stories (2011), among others.

Gordimer experienced retribution for her frankness several times. The apartheid government banned The Late Bourgeois World, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, and A World of Strangers for varying lengths of time. In 2001 the education department in one of the nation’s provinces removed July’s People, along with other antiapartheid literature, from its reading list as “deeply racist, superior and patronizing.” To combat such government repression, Gordimer worked on the steering committee of the Anti-Censorship Action Group, helped found the Congress of South African Writers, and was a vice president of International PEN. She also was active in seeking government funds for the prevention and treatment of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in her country.

Gordimer was a much-honored writer who achieved world recognition. Among her many awards are the W. H. Smith award in 1961 for Friday’s Footprints; the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Guest of Honour in 1972; the Booker Prize for The Conservationist in 1975; the Grand Aigle d’Or in 1975; the Scottish Arts Council Neil M. Gunn Fellowship in 1981; the Modern Language Association Award in 1982; the Bennett Award in 1987; the Premio Malaparte in 1985; the Nelly Sach Prize in 1986; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for A Sport of Nature in 1988; and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best Book from Africa for The Pickup in 2002. In 2007, France made Gordimer a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. She received more than a dozen honorary degrees, beginning with an honorary DLitt degree from the University of Leuven in 1980. She was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Literature and Arts, Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and a fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature.

Significance

Gordimer’s fiction is above all an attempt to awaken people from the slumber of habit, and to reveal the corruptions brought by racism, including the subtle corruptions of whites. Gordimer’s art evokes high and difficult aims: to enlarge the reader’s apprehension of South Africa’s troubling history, to write of it with honesty and objectivity, succumbing neither to the self-pity of white people nor to the romanticizing of black people, and yet to retain the necessary passion of commitment. Accordingly, her fiction has depicted the alterations in South Africa since the 1940s, an era of profound change wrought both by the corrosive effect of institutionalized racism and by the complex struggles to end it. For these reasons she has been called the conscience of South Africa.

Personal Life

Nadine Gordimer died on July 13, 2014, in Johannesburg. She was ninety. Her second husband, Reinhold Cassirer, died in 2001. She was survived by her daughter and son.

Bibliography

Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. London: Allen, 1986. Print..

Cooke, John. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985. Print.

Goldblatt, David, and Nadine Gordimer. "Lifetimes under Apartheid." World Literature Today 87.2 (2013): 32–37. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Gordimer, Nadine. The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places. Edited by Stephen Clingman. New York: Knopf, 1988. Print.

Gordimer, Nadine. “A South African Childhood: Allusions in a Landscape.” New Yorker 16 Oct. 1954. Print..

Haq, Husna. “Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize–Winning Writer and Critic of South African Apartheid, Dies (+Video).” Christian Science Monitor. Christian Science Monitor, 14 July 2014. Web. 16 Sept. 2015.

Hurwitt, Jannika. “The Art of Fiction LXXVII: Nadine Gordimer.” Paris Review 88 (Summer, 1983): 83–127. Print.

JanMohamed, Abdul R. Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1983. Print.

McEwan, Neil. Africa and the Novel. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1983. Print.

Newman, Judie, ed. Nadine Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Roberts, Ronald Suresh. No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer. Johannesburg: STE, 2001. Print..

Spain, Andrea. "Event, Exceptionalism, and the Imperceptible: The Politics of Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup." Modern Fiction Studies 58.4 (2012): 747–72. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Verongos, Helen T. "Nadine Gordimer, Novelist Who Took On Apartheid, Is Dead at 90." New York Times 15 July 2014: A1. Print.

Will, Donald. "No Time Like the Present: A Novel." Africa Today 59.3 (2013): 170–73. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Yelin, Louise. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. Print.