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Nadine
Gordimer, the South African writer whose literary ambitions led her
into the heart of apartheid to create a body of fiction that brought her
a Nobel Prize in 1991, died on Sunday in Johannesburg. She was 90.
Her family announced her death in a statement.
Ms.
Gordimer did not originally choose apartheid as her subject as a young
writer, she said, but she found it impossible to dig deeply into South
African life without striking repression. And once the Afrikaner
nationalists came to power in 1948, the scaffolds of the apartheid
system began to rise around her and could not be ignored.
“I
am not a political person by nature,” Ms. Gordimer said years later. “I
don’t suppose, if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have
reflected politics much, if at all.”
But
whether by accident of geography or literary searching, she found her
themes in the injustices and cruelties of her country’s policies of
racial division, and she left no quarter of South African society
unexplored, from the hot, crowded cinder-block neighborhoods and tiny
shebeens of the black townships to the poolside barbecues, hunting
parties and sundowner cocktails of the white society.
Through
Ms. Gordimer’s work, international readers learned the human effects of
the “color bar” and the punishing laws that systematically sealed off
each avenue of contact among races. Her books are rich with terror: The
fear of the security forces pounding on the door in the middle of the
night is real, and freedom is impossible. Even the political prisoner
released from jail is immediately rearrested after experiencing the
briefest illusion of returning to the world.
Critics
have described the whole of her work as constituting a social history
as told through finely drawn portraits of the characters who peopled it.
Ms.
Gordimer told little about her own life, preferring to explore the
intricacies of the mind and heart in those of her characters. “It is the
significance of detail wherein the truth lies,” she once said.
But
some critics saw in her fiction a theme of personal as well as
political liberation, reflecting her struggles growing up under the
possessive, controlling watch of a mother trapped in an unhappy
marriage.
Ms.
Gordimer was the author of more than two dozen works of fiction,
including novels and collections of short stories in addition to
personal and political essays and literary criticism. Her first book of
stories, “Face to Face,” appeared in 1949, and her first novel, “The
Lying Days,” in 1953. In 2010, she published “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008,” a weighty volume of her collected nonfiction.
Banned Novels and a Nobel
Three
of Ms. Gordimer’s books were banned in her own country at some point
during the apartheid era — 1948 to 1994 — starting with her second
novel, “A World of Strangers,” published in 1958. It concerns a young
British man, newly arrived in South Africa, who discovers two distinct
social planes that he cannot bridge: one in the black townships, to
which one group of friends is relegated; the other in the white world of
privilege, enjoyed by a handful of others he knows.
“A World of Strangers” was banned for 12 years and another novel, “The Late Bourgeois World”
(1966), for 10: long enough to be fatal to most books, Ms. Gordimer
noted. “The Late Bourgeois World” deals with a woman who faces a
difficult choice when her ex-husband, a traitor to the anti-apartheid
resistance, commits suicide.
The
third banned novel was one of her best known, “Burger’s Daughter,” the
story of the child of a family of revolutionaries who seeks her own way
after her father becomes a martyr to the cause. It was unavailable in
South Africa for only months rather than years after it was published in
1979, in part because by then its author was internationally known.
Ms.
Gordimer was never detained or persecuted for her work, though there
were always risks to writing openly about the ruling repressive regime.
One reason may have been her ability to give voice to perspectives far
from her own, like those of colonial nationalists who had created and
thrived on the system of institutionalized oppression that was named the
“grand apartheid” (from the Afrikaans word for “apartness”) when it
became law.
Her
ability to slip inside a life completely different from her own took
her beyond the borders of white and black to explore other cultures
under the boot of apartheid. In the 1983 short story “A Chip of Glass
Ruby,” she entered an Indian Muslim household, and in the novel “My Son’s Story”
(1990), she wrote of a mixed-race character. She won the Booker Prize
in 1974 for “The Conservationist,” which had a white male protagonist.
Long
before the struggle against apartheid was won, some of her books looked
ahead to its overthrow and a painful national rebirth. In “July’s People”
(1981), a violent war for equality has come to the white suburbs,
driving out the ruling minority. In a reversal of roles, July, a black
servant, brings his employers, a white family, to his isolated village,
where he can protect them.
Ms.
Gordimer wrote: “The decently-paid and contented male servant, living
in their yard since they had married, clothed by them in two sets of
uniforms, khaki pants for rough housework, white drill for waiting at
table, given Wednesdays and alternate Sundays free, allowed to have his
friends visit him and his town woman sleep with him in his room — he
turned out to be the chosen one in whose hands their lives were to be
held; frog prince, saviour, July.”
In “A Sport of Nature”
(1987), the white wife of an assassinated black leader becomes, with a
new husband, the triumphant first lady of a country rising from the
rubble of the old order.
Perhaps
surprisingly, Ms. Gordimer’s books were not the product of someone who
had grown up in a household where the politics of race were discussed.
Rather, Ms. Gordimer said, in her world, the minority whites lived among
blacks “as people live in a forest among trees.”
It
was not her country’s problems that set her to writing, she said. “On
the contrary,” she wrote in an essay, “it was learning to write that
sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of
life.”
Nadine
Gordimer was born to Jewish immigrant parents on Nov. 20, 1923, in
Springs, a mining town in the province now known as Gauteng (formerly
part of the vast northeastern area referred to as the Transvaal). Her
father, Isidore Gordimer, a watchmaker who had been driven by poverty to
emigrate from Lithuania, eventually established his own jewelry store.
Her mother, the former Nan Myers, had moved with her family from Britain
and never stopped thinking of it as home.
Theirs was an unhappy marriage.
“I suspect she was sometimes in love with other men,” Ms. Gordimer said in a 1983 interview
with The Paris Review, “but my mother would never have dreamt of having
an affair.” Instead she poured her energy, sometimes to a smothering
degree, into raising Nadine and her older sister, Betty.
As
a child, Ms. Gordimer recalled, she was a brash show-off who loved to
dance and dreamed of becoming a ballerina. But her mother insisted that
she stop dancing, because she had a rapid heartbeat. When she was 10,
her mother pulled her out of the convent school she attended, telling
her daughter that participating in running and swimming could harm her.
Years
later, Ms. Gordimer said she learned that the rapid heartbeat was a
result of an enlarged thyroid, and that it did not pose the danger her
mother had implied. She came to believe that her supposed ill health had
dovetailed with her mother’s hunger for romance.
“The
chief person she was attracted to was our family doctor,” she told The
Paris Review. “There’s no question. I’m sure it was quite unconscious,
but the fact that she had this delicate daughter, about whom she could
be constantly calling the doctor — in those days doctors made house
calls, and there would be tea and cookies and long chats — made her keep
my ‘illness’ going in this way.”
Childhood Reflected in Fiction
Scholars and critics have found threads from Ms. Gordimer’s childhood running through her fiction. John Cooke, in his book “The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes,”
saw “the liberation of children from unusually possessive mothers” as a
central theme in Ms. Gordimer’s work. In novel after novel, he wrote,
“daughters learn that truly leaving ‘the mother’s house’ requires
leaving ‘the house of the white race.’ ”
It took Ms. Gordimer years to tear herself from her mother’s house.
Removed
from school, Ms. Gordimer said, she became a “little old woman,”
studying with a tutor and accompanying her mother to social engagements.
The antidote to her isolation was reading, she said.
In
1945, she attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg
and thrived in what she called the “nursery bohemia” of university life,
studying literature and deciding to pursue a writing life.
With
the exception of a trip to what is now known as Zimbabwe, it was not
until she was 30 that she ventured outside South Africa.
In
1949, Ms. Gordimer married a dentist, Gerald Gavron, and they had a
daughter, Oriane. The marriage ended in divorce in 1952. Two years
later, she married Reinhold H. Cassirer, an art dealer who had fled Nazi
Germany and was a nephew of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Their son,
Hugo, was born in 1955. Reinhold Cassirer died in 2001; her son and her
daughter survive her.
Ms.
Gordimer said little about her personal life in interviews. Journalists
commonly noted her impatience with certain personal questions,
sometimes describing her response as disdainful and irritable.
She
did mention flirtations on occasion. “My one preoccupation outside the
world of ideas was men,” she once said, without providing details.
She
never wrote an autobiography. “Autobiography,” she said in 1963, “can’t
be written until one is old, can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, can’t be
sued for libel, or, worse, contradicted.”
She was, however, the subject of a 2005 biography, “No Cold Kitchen,” which drew wide attention
not least for the bitter fallout she had with its author, Ronald Suresh
Roberts, a former Wall Street lawyer who had grown up in Trinidad. She
had originally authorized the biography and granted him access, but she
later withdrew the authorization, objecting to the manuscript and
accusing the author of breach of trust. The publishers under contract
for the book — Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and
Bloomsbury in Britain — declined to issue it. (Both also were publishers
of Ms. Gordimer’s work.)
The biography was eventually published
by a small South African house and was the talk of literary South
Africa for its accusation that Ms. Gordimer had admitted to fabricating
key elements in an autobiographical essay in The New Yorker in 1954. It
also paints Ms. Gordimer as a hypocritical white liberal whose words
masked a paternalistic attitude toward black South Africa.
When
the Nobel committee awarded Ms. Gordimer the literature prize in 1991,
it took note of her political activism but observed, “She does not
permit this to encroach on her writings.”
That
sentiment was one she said she clung to throughout her career. In 1975,
she wrote in the introduction to her “Selected Stories”: “The tension
between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a
writer. That is where we begin.”
In
later interviews, she said that no one could live in a society like
South Africa’s and stay isolated from politics. Looking back, she told an interviewer
in 1994, “The fact that my books were perceived as being so political
was because I lived my life in this society that was so much changed by
conflict, by political conflict, which of course in practical terms is
human conflict.”
She
never stopped grappling with politics, despite her disdain for the
polemical. And book by book, she crept closer to reconciling her writing
with her political self. What she did not want to do, she said, was to
write in the service of the anti-apartheid movement, despite her deep
contempt for the government system. Over time, she revealed that she had
been far from passive when politics touched her personally. She passed
messages; hid friends, including high-ranking figures, who were trying
to elude the police; and secretly drove others to the border. All these
actions appear in her fiction, carried out by characters much braver
than she portrayed herself to be.
The great victory, the end of apartheid, is not the end of the knotty moral problems those characters confront. In “None to Accompany Me,”
published in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela was elected president in the
country’s first fully democratic vote, one subplot concerns a black
political exile, Didymus Maqoma, who comes home only to find that he has
no place in the current struggle. Despite his sacrifices, he is
overlooked by the post-revolutionary leaders in favor of his wife.
Reading
Ms. Gordimer’s work is a reminder that the noose around South Africans
tightened by increments, with ever stricter laws followed by
correspondingly dimmer expectations. Critics have said that the tone of
Ms. Gordimer’s writing fluctuated with the political climate, with an
air of hope giving way to a sense of bleakness as racial violence
gathered force.
Walls Come Tumbling Down
Some
of her most difficult moments came in the 1970s, when the black
consciousness movement sought to exclude whites from the fight for
majority rule. That period cut her off from many intellectuals and
artists and left her work vulnerable to criticism from many black
Africans, who contended that a white author could never authentically
tell a story through the eyes of a black character.
Ms.
Gordimer fought off that accusation, saying, “There are things that
blacks know about whites that we don’t know about ourselves, that we
conceal and don’t reveal in our relationships — and the other way
about.”
In
the end, the government was too weak to enforce its laws while
contending with armed opposition within and economic and political
pressure from outside. In 1990, Mr. Mandela was released from prison; in 1991, apartheid laws were repealed, in 1993, a new Constitution was approved, and in 1994, the walls came tumbling down with the election.
During
that exhilarating period, when Mr. Mandela’s African National Congress
party regained legal standing, Ms. Gordimer, who had been a secret
member, paid her dues in person and got a party card.
It
was then, after the release of the man who would be president within a
few years, that Ms. Gordimer won the Nobel Prize. “Mandela still doesn’t
have a vote,” she said at the time.
Ms.
Gordimer went on writing after apartheid, resisting the idea that its
demise had deprived her of her great literary subject. It “makes a big
difference in my life as a human being,” she said, “but it doesn’t
really affect me in terms of my work, because it wasn’t apartheid that
made me a writer, and it isn’t the end of apartheid that’s going to stop
me.”
But
there were critics who thought she had lost her bearings. In a review
of her 1998 novel, “The House Gun,” in which a white South African
husband and wife see their only son go on trial for the murder of a
friend, Michiko Kakutani wrote
in The New York Times that the book suggested that the author “has yet
to come to terms, artistically, with the dismantling of apartheid and
her country’s drastically altered social landscape.”
She ventured into an Arab country in her 2001 novel, “The Pickup,”
and continued to write prolifically for years after apartheid became
history. Politically, she eventually embraced other causes, among them
the fight against the spread of the H.I.V. virus and AIDS in South
Africa and a writers’ campaign against the country’s punishing secrecy law.
In
the end, one of her greatest fears proved hollow. Although Ms. Gordimer
was immensely gratified to receive the Nobel, its valedictory
connotations led her to worry about what it said to the world about her
future.
“When I won the Nobel Prize,” she said, “I didn’t want it to be seen as a wreath on my grave.”
Correction: July 14, 2014 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the day of Ms. Gordimer’s death. It was Sunday, not Monday. That version also misstated the location to which the white characters flee with their black servant in the novel “July’s People.” It is an isolated rural village, not the township of Soweto.
Culled From NewYork Times
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