Occasion for Loving by Nadine Gordimer

First published: 1963

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1961-1962

Locale: Johannesburg, South Africa

Principal Characters:

• Jessica Stilwell, the protagonist, age thirty-eight, with three daughters by her second marriage and a teenage son by her first
• Tom Stilwell, her husband, also thirty-eight, a professor of liberal views writing a book on African history
• Boaz Davis, age thirty, who is in Johannesburg on a grant from London to study native African music
• Ann Davis, twenty-two, the wife of Boaz
• Gideon Shibalo, a black African schoolteacher and painter of exceptional talent

The Novel

Occasion for Loving is divided into four parts, the first two taking up about two-thirds of the book. The first part establishes virtually all the love and family relationships touching on Jessica Stilwell, many of which are inhibited in some way or perceived by her as disastrously limiting to her sense of personal freedom. Though an acutely perceptive person and not unlikable, Jessica is distant, even cold. The reader understands that one essential purpose of Nadine Gordimer’s novel must be to follow Jessica along an existential path toward greater self-awareness and capacity for love.

The reader perceives, first, that Jessica effectively neglects Morgan, her son by her first marriage (chiefly by ignoring or being perfunctory with him, though hardly cruel), while being normally attentive toward her daughters Elizabeth, Madge, and Clemence, aged about five to nine. (Even here, however, she seeks opportunities to be away from them.) Her husband, Tom, is decent and understanding and relates well to Morgan without condescension—as when the lad is caught with a friend in a sordid dance hall. Tom is an essential stabilizing force in Jessica’s life. Her first marriage, which ended when her young husband was killed in the war, is presented briefly in flashback as having been “unhappy”—chiefly because Jessica was too young to undertake it.

The failed first marriage reflects the failed first marriage of Jessica’s mother—who is known in this novel only as “Mrs. Fuecht,” the wife of her second husband and Jessica’s stepfather, Bruno, a Swiss engineer. Jessica exhibits almost no feeling for her mother, out of resentment of her mother’s selfish failure to “prepare her for life.” Her father died when she was a baby; as a teenager, she would gaze at his photograph and give herself over to romantic fantasy. Her stepfather she despises. It is implied that he was her mother’s lover before the death of Jessica’s father, who had also been Bruno Fuecht’s best friend. It is further implied that Bruno is Jessica’s real father and that she knows it; at her last opportunity to talk with the old man before his death, however, Jessica refuses to see him.

Initially, Jessica also fears the couple who are renting a portion of the Stilwells’ house: Boaz Davis, in Johannesburg on a grant to study African music, and his young wife Ann, “a nearly beautiful girl,” spontaneous and egocentric. At first, Jessica sees them as potential observers of the details of her life; in time, however, she comes to like them, overcoming even her prejudice against Ann’s youth and beauty. At the end of part 1, the reader may not be blamed for anticipating a possible affair between Ann and Tom.

Part 2 acquaints the reader with Ann in all her heedless opportunism and vitality. She sometimes accompanies her husband on his long periods in the field, helping him in his work; more often, she stays in Johannesburg. She is enthralled by native dances and learns to dance well in the African way. She is a “natural.” She is adventuresome. Indeed, she married the Jewish Boaz partly because it was a daring thing for the daughter of English colonists in Rhodesia to do. Though not political, neither is she racially prejudiced. Somehow, it seems easy for her to enter into an affair with the talented African painter Gideon Shibalo (despite his estranged wife, a previous white mistress named Callie Stow, and a child somewhere or other). Gordimer does not insist that this relationship is love, yet she does not allow it to be seen as simply sexual. Its special appeal to Gideon lies in Ann’s willingness to be seen with him openly—which is even better than bed for the African ego. Her exquisite heedlessness, her self-destructiveness even, has, indeed, a powerful attraction to Gideon. When Ann finally tells her husband of the affair, Boaz responds in an elaborately civilized manner—for how can he vent his rage and sense of rejection and betrayal on a black man, and a decent one at that? Ann does not break off the affair; at the same time, this has not been the sort of affair (as Jessica, endlessly curious about it, decides) that is undertaken purposely to end a marriage.

In part 3, Ann and Gideon recklessly flee in her automobile and head north to Basutoland, hoping to find a place to hide out from the world, at least for a while. The implacable racial oppression of the South African countryside, however, forces them to sleep in the car; they go days without bathing. A car breakdown is a disaster. Gideon’s friends, seen en route, will let them stay no longer than a day.

The couple, half dead from fatigue, finally drive to Jessica’s house on the beach,where she is vacationing with her daughters. At first very reluctant to take them in, she finally does the decent thing. Anyway, she genuinely likes Gideon and she is fascinated to eavesdrop on this forbidden love—which, in many of its details, has something to teach her.

In the fourth part, really no more than an epilogue, the reader learns that Ann and Gideon (and Jessica as well) have returned to Johannesburg. Ann and Boaz, however, are about to leave for Europe. The affair is simply over. Gideon takes to drink, but Tom predicts that he will go back and fight, as there is nothing else for him to do. At a party, Gideon, very drunk, calls Jessica a “white bitch.” Losing this friendship depresses her, but she has matured in her other relationships and come to understand herself more fully.

The Characters

Virtually all the deep characterization in this novel is focused on Jessica, who seems in many ways to be a close counterpart to the author. Nadine Gordimer has also been married twice and, like Jessica, was barred from normal childhood activities after about age nine because of the suspicion of a heart ailment. Jessica recalls that sheltered early life with resentment, as though there perhaps had been no genuine ailment at all—blaming her mother, justly or unjustly. The ages and dates given in the novel determine that Jessica married Tom in 1954, the same year that Gordimer married for the second time. The presence of a Jewish character in the novel may reflect the fact that Gordimer’s father was a Russian Jew.

Of primary interest is Jessica’s development as a character, regardless of her relationship to the author. She is shown at the end of the book with Morgan, having found a way to communicate with him without embarrassment, and she has softened toward her mother as well. Her relationship with Tom was not bad to start with, but now it has deepened in consequence of her observations of Ann, Gideon, and Boaz. Very early in the novel, she had spoken of Tom and herself: “They had married to share life; but, of course, there was no getting out of it, even by marriage: each must live his life for himself.” True indeed. Ann, however, has taken this logic to a point beyond what Jessica can accept. Furthermore, “living one’s life for himself” does not require one to be so aloof and so alone as Jessica has been. Perhaps in these things she will change.

Most of the other characters do not change. The three male characters and Ann are really static figures, though interesting nevertheless. The African characters, beginning with Gideon Shibalo, provide a necessary political base for the novel and introduce a wide range of exotica as well. Among the Africans are the servants Agatha and Jason. Then there is Len Mafolo, a long-standing friend of the Stilwells, who works for a group that puts on shows of African music and dancing. (It is he who introduces Ann to Gideon.) In addition, there is Gideon’s wife, Clara; his former black mistress, Ida, and her husband Sol, his good friend; and his brother-in-law, Sandile Makhawula. Introducing the reader to these native Africans in their villages and dwelling places, Gordimer provides a deadly outline of the pattern of apartheid in South Africa. When one learns in addition that Gideon was refused a passport so that he might study art in Europe on a grant that he had been awarded, one realizes that genuine relationships between white and black are impossible (or at best, rarely, only temporary). This impossibility, perceived as failure on the part of whites, dominates the novel at its close, despite any small successes the whites depicted in it might have attained in their sophisticated private lives.

Critical Context

Occasion for Loving is Gordimer’s third novel, following The Lying Days (1953) and A World of Strangers (1958). The author has expressed dissatisfaction with all three early works, though Occasion for Loving is clearly the best of the three, and in general it has enjoyed a decent reputation. Her management of viewpoint is skillful, as she tends to follow the procedure of her best short stories up to that time, balancing potential racial melodrama against other, more complex human situations.

Occasion for Loving is a significant work simply for its response to the implementation of apartheid in South Africa following the Sharpville massacre and the banning of peaceful protest by Africans. It is, in that sense, a daring work and attests Nadine Gordimer’s integrity as both a writer and a citizen. Tom Stilwell’s tentative reference to blowing up a power plant at the end of the book becomes a forecast of the future—to be taken up by Gordimer in such later novels as The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughter (1979), and July’s People (1981).

Bibliography

Cooke, John. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives, Public Landscapes, 1985.

Green, Robert. “Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism,” in Bulletin of Bibliography. XLII (March, 1985), pp. 5-11.

Haugh, Robert F. Nadine Gordimer, 1974.

Heywood, Christopher. Nadine Gordimer, 1983.

Wade, Michael. Nadine Gordimer, 1978.