The Late Bourgeois World

by Nadine Gordimer

  Although Max had been a member of a Communist cell at the university, he did not take a strictly Marxist line in his attempts to give Africans some background for the evolution of their own political thinking. And when the Communist Party began to function again, as an underground organization, although he was approached to become active under its discipline, he did not do so. He had been very young and unimportant during his brief experience in the Communist cell; maybe that had something to do with it – he didn’t see himself in that limited status, any more. After the Defiance Campaign, in which people of all sorts of political affiliation took part, he joined the new non-racial Liberal Party for a while, and then the Congress of Democrats. But the Africans themselves did not take the Liberal Party seriously; he saw himself set aside in a white group that Africans felt had the well-meaning presumption to speak for them. Even in the Congress of Democrats, a radical white organization (it provided a front for some important Communists) that did not confine itself to polite platform contacts at multi-racial conferences, he was restless. The COD people worked directly with African political movements, but had come into being mainly because, while identifying themselves with the African struggle, they understood as a matter of tactics that no African movement seeking mass support can afford to have white members.

  I hadn’t joined the Liberal Party, but I worked in COD, not exactly with Max, but mostly on backroom stuff, printing propaganda for the African National Congress, and so on. You make curiously intense friendships when you work with the fear and excitement of police raids at your back. I believed in what I was doing and in the people I was doing it with. I certainly had enough courage to measure up to what was needed then – before Ninety Days – and I limited my activities only because of Bobo. Other people had children, too, of course, and they put their political work first, but then if Max and I were both to have been arrested there would have been literally no one to look after Bobo but Daphne, since even the thought of him being taken over by the Van Den Sandts or my parents constituted, for me, real abandonment.

  I’m mincing words. After all these years, because Max is lying drowned. It’s like putting on a hat for a funeral, the old shabby convention that one must lie about people because they’re dead. The fact is, there was no one responsible for Bobo except myself. Max was unable to be aware of anyone’s needs but his own. My mother once called this inability ‘horrible selfishness’; whereas it was the irreversible training of his background that she had admired so much, and that she saw him as a crazy deviate from. Driven to school and home again by the chauffeur every day, and then shut out of the rooms where the grown-ups were at their meetings and parties, at the Van Den Sandts he was ministered to like a prince in a tower. Even poverty didn’t release him; and we were poor enough. He had the fanatic’s few needs, and expected that they should be answered. He bought a pair of shoes or books or brandy on credit and was arrogantly angry when we were asked to pay; or assumed that I would deal with the shops. Max simply did not know what it was to live with others; he knew all the rest of us as he knew Raskolnikov and Emma Bovary, Dr Copeland and Törless, shut up reading alone in his room on the farm. He would sit for hours analysing a man’s troubles and attitudes with good insight and a compound of curiosity and sympathy, but he would not notice that the man was exhausted; nor would he remember that the man had mentioned that he had to catch a train home at a certain time. He used to take Bobo off down to Fordsburg to be handed about among the adoring young daughters of a multiple Indian household, and then, eager to follow up an acquaintance he’d perhaps made the night before, he’d go on to some yard or house and dump Bobo with a set of faces or a pair of arms – anybody’s – the baby had never seen before. Once Fatima phoned me to say that the mother of a cartage contractor in Noordgesig, the Coloured township, had rung her up to get my number, because Bobo was yelling and she didn’t know what to offer him. Max had left with her son and Fatima’s brother; left Bobo as he used to drop a bicycle or toy for the servants to pick up from the Van Den Sandts’ lawn.

  I tried to explain to Myra Roberts, a woman who seemed to me to have the only ‘saving grace’ there is – a natural feeling of responsibility for strangers as for one’s own family and friends – that COD couldn’t count on both Max and me because of Bobo. She said, ‘Oh we feel we can count on you!’ – and the emphasis made first my face burn and then hers. For a time I showed a certain coldness to her to make up for the disloyalty of that flush.

  And yet Max would have done anything. That was somehow the trouble. When he was given a job he would always take it a stage beyond what he had been told was its intended limit. If (he was working on the news-sheet) he were asked to write a leader along certain lines, he would pursue the given conclusions further. He wrote well and would have liked to be editor of the news-sheet; if the executive could have felt assured that he would not use it to follow his own line and commit them where they did not choose to be committed, I think he’d have been made editor. In committee he sat charged with the desire to act – silent, shabby in his undergraduate non-conformist uniform of cracked veldskoen and blond beard, a nervous hand across his mouth. As they spoke – the experienced ones, who knew you must not risk bringing the banning of the organization nearer by one wasted word or step – his bright eyes paced them. And when they had finished he would seize upon the plan of action: ‘I’m seeing the trade union people tomorrow, anyway – I’ll talk to them.’ ‘This’s something that can only be done with the youth groupers. We’ll have to get together with Tlulo and Mokgadi, Brian Dlalisa and that Kanyele fellow must be kept clear of –’ A febrile impatience came from the sense that was always in him of being, in the end, whatever was done when working with white people like himself, outside the locations and prisons and work-gangs and overcrowded trains that held the heart of things.

  But the others decided who should do what and they knew best who should approach whom. He would come home with the charge banked up glowing within him. The prescribed books on history, philosophy and literary criticism lay about (I read them while he was busy at meetings); what on earth would he have done with a Bachelor of Arts degree, anyway? It was a dead end that would have served a rich man’s son as a social token of attendance at a university. Perhaps he might have written something – he had passion and imagination; there were attempts, but he needed day-to-day involvement with others too much to be able to withhold himself in the inner concentration that I imagine a writer needs. He might have made a lawyer; but all the professions were part of the white club whose life membership ticket, his only birthright, he had torn up. He might have been a politician, even (it was in the family, after all), if political ambitions outside the maintenance of white power had been recognized. He might even have been a good revolutionary, if there had been a little more time, before all radical movements were banned, for him to acquire political discipline.

  There are possibilities for me, but under what stone do they lie?

  Max came home with a man called Spears Qwabe. He was a sodden, at-ease ex-schoolmaster who talked in a hoarse, soft voice. ‘The dangerous thing is we don’t look to see what comes after the struggle, we don’t think enough about what’s there on the other side. You must know where you’re going, man. You ask any of the chaps in town how he thinks we’re going to live when we’ve settled with the whites. He’s got a dreamy look in his eye thinking he’ll get a car and a job with a desk, that’s all. The same old set-up, only he’s not going to sit in the location or carry a pass. Even the political crowd don’t know where they going ideologically. ANC takes advice from the Commies, they willing to use their techniques of struggle, fine, okay, but apart from the few chaps who are Communists first and Africans second, who believes that ANC wants a society along orthodox Communist lines? They haven’t got a social doctrine – all right, you can wave the Freedom Charter, but how far does it go …? The same thing with PAC. Thinking just doesn’t go beyond the struggle. And if it does – without making a no
ise about it, what d’you think it is? What’s it amount to? Listen to them talk in their sleep and you’ll hear they just want to take over the works – the whole white social and economic set-up, man, the job lot. A black capitalist country with perhaps – I’ll say maybe – the nationalization of the mines as a gesture. “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.” Nice poetry. But how they really going to work out an equitable distribution of what we’ve got? Does anybody talk sense about that? Does anybody bother to? And why should we have to take over any of the solutions of the East and West, cut-and-dried?’

  ‘You will, largely, whether you like it or not, because you’ll be taking over various institutions of the East and West, won’t you, you’re not going back to barter and cowrie currency –’ Max wanted to encourage him, show him off.

  ‘But wait – that’s nothing – human institutions are adaptable, isn’t it? What we need is to see ourselves as an industrialized people who can break out of the Capitalist–Communist pattern set by the nineteenth century for an industrialized society, and make a new pattern. Break right out.’ He talked a long time that first day he came, but maybe I remember as what he said then also what I heard him say later, at other times. ‘We want a modern democratic state, yes? Tribalism will make it bloody difficult, even here, where tribalism’s been just about finished off by the whites, anyway, although this government is playing it up again with Bantustans and so on. We must take the democratic elements of tribalism and incorporate them, use them, in a new doctrine of practical socialism. Socialism from Africa and for Africa. We don’t need to go to the West or the East to learn about the evils of monopoly, man – land always belonged to the tribe, grazing belonged to the tribe. You don’t have to teach us responsibility for the community welfare, we’ve always looked after each other and each other’s children. All this must be brought into a new ethos of the nation, eh? The spirit of our socialism will come from inside, from us, the technical realization will come from outside.’

  Then Max began suddenly to rummage among our books and piles of newspapers, and he handed him Nyerere’s book.

  ‘Yes, yes – I know – but African socialism can’t be the work of one man. The doctrine of African socialism must be made by different thinkers, all adding to it. We must put it down, man. We’ve got political heroes, no thinkers. Mbeki, yes, all right, perhaps. We’ll have plenty political martyrs, plenty more; no thinkers! We must put it down, man!’

  When Max was deeply interested, he had a way of standing before the person with whom he was in conversation, literally closing in for an exchange. I remember how he stood above the man in the dirty raincoat (even on the hottest day Spears held about him the late loneliness of a rainy three in the morning) saying, ‘Yes … but the two must run together, African socialism must be the philosophy of the struggle, it must be in at the struggle now – if it’s going to mean anything –’

  I liked Spears. He drank but although he couldn’t always manage his legs he never lost the use of his tongue. He had a small coterie and they started calling themselves ‘Umanyano Ngamandla’, which meant something like ‘Let’s pull together’, as a colloquial name for an African socialist movement. Most of them were men who had broken away from the African National Congress or Pan African Congress. Max became their guru, or Spears became his; it doesn’t matter. COD ceased to exist in Max’s consciousness, he didn’t manage to return in decent order the papers that belonged to work he had been doing. I know that I went through our things to try and find them, but months dragged by, we moved house, and I grew more and more embarrassed at being asked for them. I had continued to work with COD because I thought Max was wrong – it frightened me to see him simply forget about the people we had worked with there. But I began to see in the work COD did, if not in my friends who did it, limitations that were in the nature of such an organization and that had always been there: I needed Max to be right.

  Spears was with us most of the time. He and Max were formulating his methodology of African socialism. Max saw it as a series of pamphlets that would become the handbook, anyway, if not the bible, of the African revolution. We must put it down, man. The phrase was at once the purpose Spears lived by and the net of catchwords in which he tried to collect purpose when he was drinking; you could laugh at him when he repeated it drunk, go ahead and laugh at the infirmity of him: but it was like the name of a God, that does not alter in its omnipotence whether used as a curse or a blessing. We must put it down, man. I heard it all the time. It was the beat in his voice spacing the political clichés, grammatical constructions translated from Xhosa and literal translations from Afrikaans, of his strong-flavoured English.

  And yet he did not see ‘getting it down’ in quite the literal terms that Max did, that Max could not escape from. Max planned point by point, chapter by chapter (at one time he thought of writing the whole thing in the form of Platonic dialogues); but Spears’ thinking erupted in a lava that, cooled to the process of note-taking, was difficult to break down into its component dissertation and analysis. Max and Spears talked late into the nights and every day Max wrote and recast from notes and memory. That was the time I came home from work and found Max yelling back at screaming Bobo. He had been trying to work all afternoon against the baby’s noisy games and interruptions. Max’s face was a child’s mask of hysterical frustration: I took Bobo and walked in the streets with him, but there was nothing I could do for the face of Max.

  For hours he stood planted, arguing in front of Spears, he couldn’t stay put, in a chair. Spears was intense but quite without Max’s tension; he could talk just as well sitting on the kitchen table while I fried sausages, or while Bobo climbed up and used his shoulders as a road for a toy car. He used to call me ‘Honey’ and once or twice, when he was only a little drunk, he cornered me in the kitchen, but I told him I didn’t like the smell of brandy, and he kneaded my hand regretfully and said, ‘Forget it, honey’; I think that most of his drive towards women had washed away in brandy, but the residue was an unspecified casual tenderness to which Bobo and I responded. And Max. Max most of all. There was Max standing urgently over him, protesting, arguing, pressing – it was not just the determination to get it all down that held Max there; he hovered irresistibly towards what could never be got down, what Spears didn’t need to get down because it was his – an identity with millions like him, an abundance chartered by the deprivation of all that Max had had heaped upon himself. Some of the white people I know want the blacks’ innocence; that innocence, even in corruption, of the status of victim; but not Max. And everyone knows those whites who want to be allowed to ‘love’ the blacks out of guilt; and those who want to be allowed to ‘love’ them as an aberration, a distinction. Max wasn’t any of these. He wanted to come close; and in this country the people – with all the huddled warmth of the phrase – are black. Set aside with whites, even his own chosen kind, he was still left out, he experienced the isolation of his childhood become the isolation of his colour.

  I don’t know whether Max loved me. He wanted to make love with me, of course. And he wanted to please me – no, he wanted my approval, my admiration for whatever he did. These pass as definitions of love; I can think of others that are neither more nor less acceptable. This business of living for each other, that one hears about; it can just as well be living for the sight of one’s self in the other’s eyes. Something keeps two people together; that’s as far as I’d go. ‘Love’ was the name I was given for it, but I don’t know that it always fits my experience. Someone has given Bobo the name, too; didn’t he say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t love him?’ What did he mean? Did he mean that he didn’t need his father? Or that he didn’t stop his father from dying?

  I wanted to make love to Max, and I wanted to give him the approval he wanted, I wanted to please him. But it wasn’t a matter of watching your husband rising a notch in the salary scale. What I wanted was for him to
do the right things so that I could love him. Was that love?

  Max was wonderful in bed because there was destruction in him. Passion of a kind; demonic sex. I’ve had it with others, since. With every orgasm I used to come back with the thought: I could die like that. And of course that was exactly what it was, the annihilation, every time, of the silences and sulks, the disorder and frustration of the days. We moved four times in the first three years, each time in response to having reached another impossible situation – living in a one-room flat with a baby; working at home in a two-room flat with a baby; not being able to afford a larger flat on my salary; not being allowed to have Africans visit us in the building – and there was never time or money to make each place more than habitable. Everything had happened to us too soon; before we’d collected enough chairs to sit on the ones we had had begun to fall to bits.

  It was Felicity Hare who tacked cotton cloth she had brought from Kenya round the packing cases our stuff was moved in to a converted outhouse in someone’s backyard. We used them as cupboards and tables. We had space there, and she lived with us for a time – a big, red-faced girl just down from Cambridge who wanted to ‘do something’ in Africa. She had been handed on down the continent from territory to territory by introductions from friends of friends and always either in danger of being deported by a British colonial government when she became too friendly with African nationalists, or appealing to a British consulate for protection when African governments wanted her deported for becoming too friendly with members of their Opposition. She wore shorts and would follow you from room to room, talking, whatever you were doing, hitching herself on some ledge or table corner too small to support her, with her enormous, marbled legs doubled up in a great fleshy pedestal. Her conversation was confused and conspiratorial – ‘Actually, the woman in charge of the place wasn’t American at all, she was a Dane, and the girls couldn’t stick her. Couldn’t understand what she was saying d’y’know. That’s another thing I didn’t tell you – they came from about twenty different tribes and could scarcely understand English anyway. But there’d been some fiddle in the State Department – that’s clear – and she wasn’t the one who was supposed to be there, at all. The girls weren’t learning a thing, but old Alongi Senga –’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘– Senga, Minister of Education, d’y’know, stupid old bastard, Matthew Ochinua says they say all he wants to do is inspect high schools so’s he can pinch the boys’ bottoms. Anyway, he’d had a row with the Field Service people –’ Most of the stories ended with a shrug of the breasts and the big face gazing away, as if she had just discovered them, at her tiny hands with their little shields of bitten-down nail pressed into the plump pad of each finger: ‘So that was that …’ ‘So I was off …’