Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  I set off up Muhavura early in the morning and climbed to 10,000 feet, well into the bamboo belt. The gorillas do venture up the full 14,000 feet of the volcano, but bamboos provide their beds – a fresh one each night – and a favoured food, and the guide felt that if we were to come upon them at all, it would be there among the bamboos that enclosed us like the bars of a vegetable prison. Progress was a matter of squeezing between them, usually on hands and knees because the glassy-wet earth gave no foothold. We were within a degree of the Equator – but it was dripping cold, up there; where there was no bamboo, there were leafless, lichen-scaly trees spun all over with a floss of moss that came against your face like a wet sponge.

  A broken stalk of wild celery, a huge, knobbly-surfaced mushroom, nibbled and discarded, made a trail read by the guide. Soon he showed me five fresh gorilla beds, that had been slept in the night before. They looked more like giant nests than beds; the stout bamboo poles were bent together five or six feet above ground, and then roughly thatched with leaves. There was fresh dung, and in the wet earth, huge knuckle-marks – like us, the gorillas use hands as well as feet to get along on the mountain. This deserted bedroom had an odour that curiously matched the gorilla’s own place in creation; not quite man, not entirely beast, a compound of lodging-house back room and zoo enclosure.

  I did not see the gorillas although we trailed them for four hours. Apparently people who do come upon them do so quite suddenly; the male, who may be a 600-pound six-footer, then stands his ground, beating his breast and arms and giving a blood-freezing battle cry, while the females and young make off. How the exhilarating mixture of curiosity and pure funk with which I sought this experience would have stood up to it, I shall not know until I go back one day and try again; for this time, my sense of let-down was forgotten by the surprise when I turned my back on Muhavura for the climb down, and saw before me a marvel of a plain far below, with little volcanoes set in it like cupcakes fallen in in the middle, and the grain and counter-grain of the scratchings of agriculture, and more volcanoes, ringed from base to summit with contoured planting in a pattern as ordered as the plaiting on the Africans’ heads, and the pale moonstone gleam of yet another volcano that held, instead of fire and brimstone, a lake.

  Climbing down, we sank slowly, like birds coming to rest, to the level of this plain.

  The white man, as a power, is fast becoming extinct in Africa; it may be that the wild animals will follow him. Africans and animals have lived together so long that one is inclined to think of them as belonging together in a natural order, but the truth is that the domain of the beasts has long been a puppet kingdom, upheld by white governments not only by means of game preserves and sanctuaries, but, more important, by stringent hunting laws outside them. Once the greater part of the continent is ruled independently by the Africans themselves, it is unlikely that they will be able to regard the beasts as anything but a supply of meat and an obstacle to the expansion of farmland. By the time the Africans have secured confidence in their place in the twentieth century, it may be too late to remedy the sacrifice of the beasts. It is just possible that this sacrifice might be avoided if the African states would agree to let the game preserves be the responsibility of an international authority, such as the United Nations.

  Whatever happens, the hour of man has struck in Africa. We have swarmed over the whole of creation; it would be humbug to pretend not to hear, simply because elephants often seem so much nobler than men, buck more beautiful and even lion less menacing.

  I left the Congo with men’s voices in my ears. It was in Katanga (Shaba), the rich province that was the first to secede from the central government. Katanga, with its copper, uranium, diamonds, gold, cobalt and tin, is richer in minerals than any other part of Africa (with perhaps the exception of the Union of South Africa) and once supplied more than half the national income of the old Belgian Congo. The Belgians in particular, and international mining interests in general, have managed to retain powerful influence in this prize territory, and its Congolese president, Moise Tshombe, is regarded in most other independent African states as a white man’s stooge – a puppet animated by the old colonial strings.

  For the first few months after independence, in June 1960, the breakaway state of Katanga was the one part of the former Belgian Congo that remained peaceful. But later tribal fighting began there, and in certain mining and industrial centres the whites were subjected to a reign of terror just as bad as those that hit the late Lumumba’s Stanleyville, or Kasavubu’s Léopoldville.

  On a Sunday morning the town square of the prosperous copper town and capital of Katanga, Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), was ready to receive President Tshombe on his return from the Brussels Conference at which the Congo had been granted independence. The day before, I had seen chiefs in leopard-skin regalia lunching at the Léopold Deux, the most elegant hotel; they had arrived from the country to welcome him. And early on Sunday morning I had been wakened by the sound of ululating cries in the streets, as less exalted supporters came into town by lorry and on foot.

  The scene in the square was one of dazzling, jazzing holiday joy. Twenty thousand faces looked from the branches of the flowering trees, from the top of buildings, from a solid phalanx in the streets – all black. There were Boy Scouts and religious sects in white and blue robes and chiefs in fur, feather and beads, and young men in forage caps and party uniform. There were several hundred women whose faces and arms were painted white and whose hair stuck out like pipe cleaners in tiny plaits all over their heads. There were drummers and dancers with tribal masks on their faces, and on their feet the issue boots they wear in the copper mines. While they stamped and sang, a white man in shorts held a microphone impassively before them.

  After a two-hour wait, a party official leaped on to the red and white striped official stand, stilled the drums and the din, and held up a gentleman’s overcoat, of discreet colour and the best tailoring. Like a thump on a gong, a tremendous cry rang out from the crowd and hung on the air: the coat was a sign, brought by dispatch rider from the airport, that their leader had truly arrived.

  Soon Tshombe came in person, a beamish, very young-looking man, as many African statesmen tend to be, standing up in an open car, a very large pink one, as many African statesmen’s cars tend to be. It had been announced that photographing of his person was forbidden: the reason – not announced – was that no one is yet quite sure that there may not be something in the old African belief that, by sticking pins into or casting a spell over an image, you may be able to bring harm to the person it represents.

  He looked afraid of nothing, nothing at all, this young man in the blue lounge suit. Yet as I watched him up there on his platform of welcome I could see that he was surrounded by everything that Africa has to fear. The faces of white men – men of prey or good will, who could tell? – were there, few and ominous, close beside him before the black crowd. And, just behind him, there was a mountainously fat chief, holding a fly whisk with the authority of a sceptre.

  1961

  Party of One

  Americans invented the word ‘image’ in the sense in which it is now associated with consumer goods everywhere. Oddly enough, it was American writers who began the image-making. In the early days of independence, the fact that English remained the language of the Americans, even though they had won the war, was a tender place on the hide of the new nation. The mandarin prose of New England was too closely associated with England; yet the slangy vitality of Artemus Ward and Mark Twain seemed too rough-and-ready to provide an American idiom. For some generations, American writers felt about uneasily for words of their own; long after they had found them, the idea of an American idiom was taken over and blurred, changed; confused with the idea of the American image. The one was a search; the other is a gimmick. I believe the American writer’s share in it was innocent; certainly – to borrow his own idiom – he wants no part of it today.

  The difference between the America of films, mag
azines and packaged goods, and the America of Faulkner, Hawthorne, Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Melville – I stab the names with a pin, hitting on past as well as present, because the then in every country is contained in its now – is extraordinary. (It is interesting that that marvellous American invention, sick humour, is based on this very difference: life as you’ve been told to want it, and life as it is.) One can’t explain away the gap in terms of the difference between art and commercialism. For though shamelessly used by commerce, the American image is also held up by Americans in high and serious places, political ones, for example. The image exalts youth, success, unquestioning patriotism, the love of a good man/woman, the confidence of freedom and of being right. The best of American writers are concerned with the difficulty of fulfilment; the corruption of integrity; the struggle for moral standards in public as well as private life; the truth of love, whatever its form, hetero- or homosexual; the battle of the individual against the might of society; and the doubt that one is right.

  I don’t mean by this that what foreigners get from American writers is an exposé of America. It is a world of real human beings grappling with real life, asking the questions instead of accepting that they know all the answers. Why do we accept the verity of this world while rejecting that of America on the back of the cereal package? For the simple reason that, being alive, we ourselves know that life is not a Happy Families game of matching sorrow with death, joy with love, freedom with a declaration of independence. It is a matter of questioning these things afresh every time they come up in individual lives; in fact, when it comes to freedom, it is a matter of measuring it by one’s right and impulse to question it constantly.

  Melville wrote: ‘I love all men that dive … the whole corps of intellectual thought-divers that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.’

  Of course, I am speaking of the divers with bloodshot eyes – the real American writers. In the context of literature, the hacks don’t concern us except as an aside: why is it that the competent, decently written library novel, a good yarn or a nice love story, is on a much higher standard in England than in America? In fact, to most non-Americans, the run-of-the-mill American novel is unreadable. (From Gone With the Wind to Advise and Consent it’s come in thousand-page hunks, too.) We see the film, but we can’t read the book.

  I think it is because although this sort of book may be expected to fill loosely the gap between the comfortable conventions and reality, advancing timidly towards one while returning, on the final page, to the other, in America the nature of the conventions – the America of the cereal package – is so remote from reality that even this is not possible. If a writer is not good enough to be able to go the whole way, he has to dream on between the genuine percale sheets. If the gap is filled in at all, it is in a different way, and by people who are not hacks but sociologists with a knack of making themselves readable to the layman. I don’t suppose the foreigner’s interest in books such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society has anything of the intensity with which Americans seize upon them for self-revelation; but, by analysing the gap, these books do fill it to the extent by which knowledge of the exact measurements of the height, depth and cubic capacity of a hole can be said to stop it up.

  Apart from bringing information about the kinds and character of life in America, what does American writing mean to the outsider? There have been no American novelist-philosophers, no Camus, for example, showing man dealing with the absurdity of his position as a finite being possessed of infinite possibilities. No novelist-humanists, either: no E. M. Forster showing that the connection between individuals, though full of the sudden infuriating silences of a bad telephone line, is sometimes made. What American writers do give is the quality of life. The sight, smell, taste, feel, sound of it; from Thoreau to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, from Katherine Anne Porter to Henry Miller and Kerouac, Americans are writers of the five senses. Many of them have been journalists as well as writers, and they have brought to creative writing the feel for the immediacy of experience that journalism demands – get it down and get it straight. If you manage to do that, you won’t need any rigmarole to explain it; it’ll explain itself. This journalist’s method, used with the creative intelligence, the precision, and the time a journalist hasn’t got, has become one of the strong influences of American writing on the literature of other countries. Not only is Hemingway – its greatest exponent if not its inventor – the most famous American writer in world literature, but there is scarcely a contemporary writer in France, Italy or Germany, let alone in the English-speaking world, who does not show traces of this influence even if he supports the current sober and sour reassessment of the tough guy who ended up as Papa.

  If Hemingway is the most famous American writer, then, to the non-American, Henry James is surely the greatest. James is the nearest to an American novelist-philospher, but we read him not so much for his marvellously complex moral structure in general as for the profundity of his understanding of America’s relation to Europe. Why is it that his Millys and Daisys are more American than Uncle Sam; speak to us more deeply of America than anyone we’ve met with right up until that unexpected encounter with Captain Yossarian, in Catch-22, last year?

  As a matter of fact, James, who seems at first thought to have nothing in common with his fellow American writers, actually shares several literary, familial traits. One of them is the curiously maddening quality of some of the American writers who turn out to be most rewarding, even wonderful. I don’t mean just the turgidity that Faulkner, in his different way, shares with James, and ultimately with Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and others; I don’t mean the sheer fighting with briars and lianas of words which one now and then gives up in heavy-breathing despair. I mean the obstinate attraction exuded by this writing which gets one dazedly on to one’s mental feet again, set on getting into the dense, closed world that the writer has made, where landmarks can only be followed once you know your way about within it blindfolded and no longer need them. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is the obvious example; but what about the New York apartment where J. D. Salinger’s Glass family lives? Salinger’s prose is like a very clean window-pane, yet to get into the room beyond needs quite a sustained effort to suspend one’s consciousness of all terms of reference other than those that direct the life of the Glasses.

  Certain kinds, and at least one period, of the literature of the English-speaking world seem to belong to America. When an Englishman thinks of the twenties, he’ll think of Fitzgerald. If (I’m told) you ask a Russian to name a ‘collectivist’ novelist in the West, he’ll name Dos Passos. And ask anyone to list the best humorous writers in the English language, and he’ll start with Mark Twain and go on to Thurber and Perelman – an all-American roster, unless he suddenly remembers Max Beerbohm. American wits – the Woolcotts and Menckens – are not much known outside. Neither are the home-spun philosophers – who is that Harry Golden man, by the way? But at least two essayists are read, beginning with Thoreau and making the logical descent in time, not quality, to E. B. White.

  Philip Toynbee has recently called Edmund Wilson the most distinguished man of letters in the English-speaking world; and many people, like myself, are more than satisfied to find the term defined thus. Edmund Wilson sent the dusty blinds shuddering up and flung the door wide on the scholarly preserves of English criticism. He has made himself indispensable to English literature not by popularisation, but by bringing to criticism along with scholarship a unique range of awareness of the contemporary world, psychological, political, linguistic, philosophical and social. Under his scrutiny, a work of art does not fall apart; it flies together in a new unity one would never have discovered for oneself. Kipling becomes as interesting as Dostoevsky; and the minor writings about the American Civil War become the best insight into that event one has ever read. Other American critics – Harry Levin, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler and Harold Rosenberg – a
re almost indispensable too, along with the little magazines in which we first read them. And the only English-writing woman who has an international reputation in literary criticism is, of course, Mary McCarthy; her bitchy brilliance is enjoyed far beyond the confines of the literati and their appreciation of her integrity and erudition.

  To us it certainly seems due to the existence of little magazines and the good commercial magazines that America has produced such outstanding short-story writers. I suppose Poe began it, followed by Sherwood Anderson, but the new life given to the short story in the New World started, so far as we are concerned, with the early stories of Hemingway. Whatever we think about his later novels, these stories put him up there with de Maupassant and Chekhov. O. Henry is half-forgotten, but still they come: very different, very brilliant – from Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter to Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike and James Purdy.

  The giants T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound have long been appropriated by English-language poetry in general, and one almost forgets that they belong to America.

  One is inclined to forget, too, that America and not England shares with France the break with poetic tradition that came about with Baudelaire and Poe just over a hundred years ago, and resulted in what has been known since, in all its various experiments and movements, as modern poetry. America has produced some important poets in this ‘tradition of the new’ (the phrase of critic Harold Rosenberg) that is partly an American achievement, but often it is its curiously original offshoots, like Marianne Moore, that seem particularly interesting to us. Poetry means something to the few, everywhere in the world; and even among those few, there are more individual blind spots than in the appreciation of any other form of writing – I know that to me Whitman is a garrulous bore; there are some who think of American poetry as Ogden Nash, or at most, e. e. cummings. But out of a catholic admiration for the various voices of Hart Crane, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louise Bogan, Theodore Roethke, Archibald MacLeish, John Crowe Ransom, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth – to name some of the poets most of us know – we have come increasingly to regard Robert Lowell as the most splendidly gifted poet writing in America now, and for a long time.