Gordimer, Nadine (1923—)

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Gordimer, Nadine (1923—)

Nobel Prize winner in Literature and one of South Africa's leading writers, who has devoted much of her career to exploring the complex personal undercurrents in her country's political and racial history in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa, on November 20, 1923; daughter of Isidore Gordimer (a Jewish shopkeeper from Lithuania) and Nan (Myers) Gordimer (daughter of a Jewish family from England); attended the University of the Witwatersrand, 1945; married Gerald Gavron (Gavronsky), on March 6, 1949 (divorced 1952); married Reinhold Cassirer, on January 29, 1954; children: (first marriage) one daughter, Oriane Gavron ; (second marriage) one son, Hugo Cassirer.

Published first story (1939); published first collection of short stories (1952); published first novel and made first trip abroad (1953); paperback edition of A World of Strangers banned in South Africa (1962); The Late Bourgeois World banned in South Africa (1971); won Booker Prize (1974); The Burger's Daughter banned for several months in South Africa (1979); participated in defense of Alexandra Township (1986); joined African National Congress (1990); won Nobel Prize for Literature (1991); delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University (1994).

Selected works:

Face to Face (1949); The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952); The Lying Days (1953); A World of Strangers (1958); Occasion for Loving (1963); The Late Bourgeois World (1966); Livingston's Companions (1971); The Conservationist (1974); The Burger's Daughter (1979); July's People (1981); A Sport of Nature (1987); My Son's Story (1990); Jump and Other Stories (1991); None to Accompany Me (1994); The House Gun (1998); (collection of essays and lectures) Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (Farrar, Straus, 1999).

Nadine Gordimer has been a leading literary figure and a respected and acute observer of South Africa since the early 1950s. The author of 11 novels and more than 200 short stories, she has presented a vivid and profound picture of sensitive members of the white community in South Africa living in a segregated society that does violence to their moral principles. Since early in her career, Gordimer's work has received international acclaim with such awards as the Booker Prize in 1974 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

Critics have lauded Gordimer for the delicacy and precision of her writing, notably in her short stories. Robert Haugh, for example, notes her possession of "the quick perceptive glance… which sparkles like a gem." And he also has praised how her insight into the human condition presents a skilled combination of "satire and pathos." He is the foremost advocate of the view that the best of her highly regarded fictional works puts aside open advocacy and concentrates instead on exploring the personal world of individuals caught up in a brutal and oppressive system. Indeed, within her large corpus of writing, Gordimer has explored such themes as the psychology of childhood, the human confrontation with death, and middle-class conformity.

But virtually all of Gordimer's works have been set in the South African milieu in which she has lived her entire life; other books, such as A Guest of Honor, have been set in different (sometimes imaginary) parts of the African continent. Thus, there is an intriguing, shifting mixture of political awareness and interest in human relations in Gordimer's fiction. She has dealt with a changing South Africa in part by using non-whites as well as whites as her heroes and heroines in order to explore the personal ramifications of South Africa's evolution over the past four decades. Moreover, Gordimer has spoken out candidly in her essays and lectures against the system of apartheid that divided the races until 1992, and she has remained a vocal commentator on political affairs to the present time.

Stephen Clingman has described the combination of the personal and the political in Gordimer's novels by noting that her works contain a "dialectical interplay," marking them with "the exploration of history and character, of external and internal worlds." Gordimer herself noted as early as 1962 that she was trying to write about "private selves" of white and black South Africans while remaining aware that "even in the most private situations, they are what they are because their lives are regulated and their mores formed by the political situation."

Gordimer has never been a popular author in her own country. Moreover, as a privileged white woman in a racist society that she herself criticizes, she has promoted changes that were likely to disrupt her own life. As critic Kathrin Wagner has noted, throughout her work stands the paradox of her sympathy for "a historical process whose revolutionary phase must destroy the comfortable contexts within she writes." Gordimer's view of white liberals like herself has featured a scathing criticism of a group that, as Wagner puts it, "highlights with considerable sharpness their inadequacies and failures as both activists and individuals."

Nadine Gordimer was born to Jewish parents in Springs, a small town located 30 miles east of Johannesburg. Her father Isidore Gordimer, a shopkeeper who had prospered as a jeweler in his adopted country, had immigrated to South Africa from Lithuania. Her mother Nan Myers Gordimer was English. Some of the future writer's most successful stories, such as "The Defeated" and "The Umbilical Cord," were to be set in Jewish-owned country stores that served a clientele of black customers.

The young girl was a mediocre student. Her education was interrupted at the age of 11 or 12 when her mother, for obscure personal reasons, claimed the girl had heart trouble and insisted on keeping her away from school. For a period of about five years, Nadine was educated at home. Nonetheless, at the age of 15 or so, she was able to attend a local Catholic school, the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, then studied briefly at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Her real education came from her prodigious reading program, and, while still a young child of nine, she began to write. Paradoxically, her first piece of writing was a poem praising the hero of South African supporters of apartheid, Paul Krüger, the country's president at the turn of the century. The future Nobel Prize winner published her first works, a number of fables, in the children's section of a Johannesburg newspaper. At the age of 15, however, she placed her first adult short story in print. She then wrote regularly for South African periodicals.

Gordimer received her initial acclaim as the author of carefully constructed and psychologically insightful short stories. Critics like Haugh have compared her skill in this genre to that of such masters as Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov. Her first collection of such works, Face to Face, appeared in South Africa in 1949, but soon thereafter she won an international reputation when her stories appeared in England and the United States. She was soon writing regularly for The New Yorker.

For her the obverse of a freedom to gaze on everything without fear or favor is clearly an obligation to do so.
—Stephen Clingman

The young writer's sense of human frailty in the face of racial division can be seen in her early story "The Catch." It appeared in The Soft Voice of the Serpent, her first collection of short stories to be published outside South Africa. A young white couple befriend an Indian fishermen and share his excitement at catching a huge salmon. Later, accompanied by white friends, they encounter him and his fish once again, but now they are overcome by snobbery and embarrassment. A deeper sense of the depth of racial separation can be seen in "Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?" In this work, which appeared in 1949, a young white girl is the victim of a purse snatching in the open countryside. Pondering her unsettling experience, she wonders sympathetically about her attacker and their common humanity. Notes Haugh: "Her finest effects are the tangential results, among whites, of a racial encounter."

Gordimer began her longer works at the same time that she was drawing praise for her early short stories. She soon went on to develop a comparably distinguished reputation as a novelist. Her first such work, The Lying Days, was published in South Africa in 1953, and in both Britain and the U.S. the following year. It was, according to Haugh, "an appealing, impressionistic novel of alienation and search" that he considers the best of all her longer works of fiction. The book traces the life of a young South African white woman from her childhood in a mining town though her first encounters with love and on to her years at the university.

Some critics find The Lying Days to be Gordimer's most autobiographical work, although her heroine, Nell, is a Christian of Scottish descent. The main Jewish character is a young man, an architecture student with whom Nell has an extended friendship. Clingman attributes the strong depiction of the mining locale and its carefully stratified society in the book to Gordimer's childhood friendship with a girl from a mining official's family. He notes that this early novel is "emblematic of Gordimer's method of writing" as "the product of close observation." It is also, in essence, the story of the heroine's personal education in the ways of her segment of the world.

Nonetheless, the book also features a consideration of the South African political situation at the close of the 1940s, a state of affairs marked by growing division between the races. A Nationalist Party government committed to harsh policies of segregation had just come to power, and black separatism was pushing sympathetic liberal whites away from any common political movement. Meanwhile, as Gordimer notes, individual South Africans involved in long-standing, loving relationships with members of another race found themselves the targets of an increasingly intrusive government.

In her next novel, A World of Strangers, published in 1958, Gordimer plunged directly into the political scene. "Virtually seven-eighths," writes Clingman, "is devoted to social observation." By now, Gordimer had become drawn into literary circles that included black writers, and she herself was increasingly interested in the political scene. In the book, the hero is a young Englishman who has come to work in South Africa. Through his eyes, Gordimer examines both the growing racial tension in her native country as well as tentative efforts by blacks and white liberals to encounter one another socially. At the book's conclusion, the hero, Toby Hood, forms a personal bond with one of the story's principal black characters. The bond implies as well the start of a political commitment for Hood. Thus, Gordimer describes the efforts of individuals to challenge the oppressive system around them.

By the early 1960s, Gordimer found herself writing in a rapidly changing political and racial environment. There was, for example, an expanding number of independent African nations. Moreover, within South Africa, the confrontation at Sharpeville in March 1960—in which police killed and wounded over 200 black demonstrators—led to increased police repression. Many of the black writers Gordimer had come to know were forced into exile. In addition, black leaders increasingly rejected an alliance with liberal whites to create a common community as Gordimer had suggested in A World of Strangers. Her succession of novels mirrored this changing political reality. Thus, Occasion for Loving, published in 1963, shows assertive black protagonists rejecting cooperation with whites as Gordimer, in Clingman's words, "acknowledges for the first time that the ultimate current of history in South Africa… is black, and not white."

Her novels now began to offend the censor. In 1962, the paperbound edition of A World of Strangers was banned, probably because the government thought the book would circulate too widely in such an inexpensive form. In 1966, The Late Bourgeois World ran afoul of South Africa's censorship laws; it too was banned.

In 1970, Gordimer responded to the changing scene in Africa, with its multitude of newly independent states, when she wrote A Guest of Honor. It tells the tragic story of a former colonial administrator who returns to the area in which he had worked, now transformed into an independent African state, only to die in a struggle between the various power factions there. The book is notable for being her first work set outside South Africa. Moreover, it introduces new themes in her writing: the conflict between members of the black population, the greed and corruption of black leaders. Some critics have found the book deeply flawed by its focus on the ugly political developments of postindependence Africa, and they consider it most valuable as a sign of Gordimer's personal education in political reality and her compelling desire to share that education with her readers.

In 1974, the prestigious Booker Prize went to Gordimer for her novel The Conservationist. In it, she presents a male hero, the industrialist Mehring, who tries to acquire and preserve a vast tract of South African wilderness. The body of an unknown black man found on Mehring's property, writes Clingman, represents how "the peace and serenity he enjoys on his farm are depending upon the institutionalized social violence that keeps the location politically subdued and quiet." In the end, a violent storm arises to drive Mehring from his land. The book's symbolism points to the impending change of power within South Africa that Gordimer perceived. A shift in her own political views likewise took place at this time: she now ceased to call herself a liberal and chose to describe her political position as that of a "white radical."

At times, Gordimer herself expressed a clear understanding that her work would be seen as an important record of changes and changing attitudes in her native country. In the introduction to the 1975 edition of her short stories, for example, she wrote: "The changes in social attitudes unconsciously reflected in the stories represent both that of the people in my society—that is to say, history—and my apprehension of it."

In 1979's Burger's Daughter, the heroine is a new type for Gordimer, a young woman who is the daughter of South African radicals. She abandons the political struggle for a time to focus on her personal needs, an action symbolized by her life abroad. But she returns from France to resume political activities. In July's People, which appeared in 1981, the author paints a grim picture of whites living in future society that has been transformed by revolution. Fleeing to the home village of their black servant, the adults of the bourgeois Smales family display the impassable gap between them and their hosts.

Dramatic shifts took place in South African life starting in the late 1980s. In 1989, several black leaders from the African National Congress were released after serving long prison terms. In 1990, in an act of vast symbolic significance, Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned hero of the antiapartheid movement, was freed after serving almost 30 years behind bars. As South Africa moved toward historic change in its racial policy, Gordimer's writing reflected the shifting situation in such works as A Sport of Nature, published in 1987, and My Son's Story, published in 1990.

A Sport of Nature has a white heroine, a Jewish South African, who marries a black revolutionary, then, after his murder, weds a second black leader. It constitutes an imagined history of postapartheid South Africa, and it concludes with the birth of a new, black state in place of the old, white-run Republic. My Son's Story likewise takes place in an imagined, postapartheid South Africa. In this work, Gordimer for the first time makes her most important characters neither black nor white but members of South Africa's mixed-race (or "coloured") population. The novel explains how the racial laws that separated whites and nonwhites have now been ended, and it goes on to explore the complex reality of a coloured family in which the father has become entangled in a relationship with a white woman.

Gordimer went well beyond her role as a writer in responding to change. In an act of solidarity with the black majority, she joined several other whites to confront armed police in defense of Alexandra, a black township, in 1986. That same year, she and other South African writers joined in a committee to oppose the government's censorship of literature. Becoming increasingly outspoken, Gordimer stated while testifying at a political trial in 1989 that she now accepted the leadership of the governing circle of the African National Congress. In 1990, she formally joined that organization.

Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1991. She was the first South African to win the honor; moreover, she was the first female writer to receive the prize in 25 years. The award corresponded in time to the end of the apartheid system in South Africa, the topic that had played so significant a role in her writing. In her acceptance speech at Stockholm, Gordimer concentrated her attention on the plight of persecuted writers. In particular, she defended Salman Rushdie, who had been condemned to death by Islamic militants for his allegedly disrespectful writings concerning the Prophet Muhammed. In the years since, Gordimer has continued to speak out on a variety of political issues.

The complexity of Gordimer's output and the length of her career as a prominent writer have encouraged critics to analyze her work from a number of new angles. For example, in The Late Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, Michael Wade has examined the question of Jewish identity in her writing. Gordimer has drawn particular attention in recent years from feminist critics like Wagner, Karen Lazar , and Dorothy Driver . They have found that, as a writer interested in the political and social world around her, Nadine Gordimer has apparently been firm in her opposition to feminist concerns. Her view of South Africa's long-standing divisions has discounted gender as a crucial factor. In 1975, for example, she wrote that "all writers are androgynous beings." In 1984, reasserting her belief in the primacy of racial over gender issues, she declared: "The white man and the white woman have much more in common than the white woman and the black woman." Nonetheless, much of her work has incorporated material on the growth and psychological changes of women characters in the society of apartheid, and Gordimer has used both male as well as female protagonists.

While the object of increasing scholarly study, Gordimer has remained a productive writer. The year that she received the Nobel Prize, she published Jump and Other Stories, her eighth volume of shorter fiction. Gordimer's novel, None to Accompany Me, appeared in 1994. Like the bulk of her earlier work, it is set in a changing South Africa in which the old system of apartheid has come to an end. Through her heroine, a liberal attorney named Vera Stark, Gordimer presents a picture of the new South Africa absorbing such changes as the return of imprisoned or exiled political activists. As in most of her work, she balances her picture of political change with an acute examination of her main character's psychological development.