Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Poised against the Mayflower is the slave ship.

  William Carlos Williams’s image (I use the word in the legitimate, poetic sense, this time) posits a balance between two forces – a balance that American writers accepted long before Congress, and, indeed, beyond the way that the law and legislation ever can. The question of this balance, implying as it does the necessity of the one force for the other, is one of the themes in American writing that mean most to non-Americans. Not ‘taken up’, but integral to the being of some of the best American writers; through their writings it has been clear to us rather sooner than to Americans that this theme was not just Southern writing, dealing with a geographically and politically defined region, but with a region of the human condition. All the white world, through the ramifications of history, shares the white man’s guilt before, and fear of, the black man. All the black world shares the black man’s humiliation by, and resentment towards, the white man. That is why the cult of négritude in literature (invented by the Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire and developed by Negroes in French-speaking Africa) reached English culture through the writings of American blacks, far from their origins in Africa; and that is also why the most profound attempt to draw up the account and present the balance between white man and black still comes from America, although most of Africa has found its freedom and its voice. William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison – in them we find the equivocalities, the contradictions, the whole emotional and moral muddle of colour; in James Baldwin we have terrifying sense made of it all. His is not ‘Negro writing’. It is perhaps the end of ‘Negro writing’ for good. It takes it to the point where a man is stripped of all kicks, kindness, rejection, patronage, and takes his identity as a man – or nothing.

  Among American themes we are naturally drawn to those that touch chillingly or illuminatingly on the conditions of life that we have in common with Americans. Materialism, that big, glittering fake that we’ve all had come apart in our hands, may have reached its apotheosis in America, but American writers have matched this by ferociously picking up the jagged pieces as other writers have not done. This, for grown-ups if not for the university students all over the world who have Tender is the Night stuffed in their pockets, is surely the source of our admiration for Scott Fitzgerald, who, if he thought the rich had special voices, showed that they end up calling in a void. No writer has handled the loneliness and alienation concomitant with a materialist society as Nathanael West did in Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. The truculent and unsqueamish honesty of Saul Bellow’s Henderson, the Rain King, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Joseph Heller’s magnificent Catch-22 last year, find no comparison in contemporary English writing, and this last book can only be matched by that extraordinary novel out of Germany, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.

  Like Grass’s Oscar, Heller’s Captain Yossarian is a kind of Last Man – a sum total of humanness (‘humanity’ is the wrong word; ‘humanity’ is one of the big abstractions they’re up against) in a world where men have imprisoned themselves. The law of supply and demand grills and drills them, God is a searchlight turned on now and then by the jailers in the observation tower, and the only cry that goes up is not ‘Ecce homo!’ but ‘Why me?’

  Captain Yossarian, a bombardier, opposes this world by making the extraordinary decision ‘to live forever, or die in the attempt’. It is a splendid battle cry on the side of life; it recognises the ultimate enemy, come peace or war, in Catch-22 – the clause that ‘fixes’ you so that you can’t win.

  There was only one catch, and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to: but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

  This is Yossarian’s first encounter with the Catch, but he continues to run head-on against it, not only in his struggle with authority in the person of Colonel Cathcart, who keeps putting up the number of missions in a tour of duty, in order to win promotion for himself on the ground, but also in his experience of big business, in the person of the pilot turned entrepreneur, Milo Minderbinder. Milo starts a ‘syndicate’ to supply the squadron with delicacies bought in job lots all over the world and flown to Pianosa, off the Italian coast, in the squadron’s planes and those of other outfits pressed into the syndicate. Milo gets so rich and deal-drunk that he ends up accepting a reasonable offer from the Germans – cost plus 6 per cent for undertaking on their behalf to bomb his own squadron’s airfield with its own planes.

  Yossarian survives Cathcart, Minderbinder and many more, and on the last page is about to attempt a getaway to Sweden. A friend asks:

  ‘How do you feel, Yossarian?’

  ‘Fine. No, I’m very frightened.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Major Danby. ‘It proves you’re still alive. It won’t be fun.’

  Yossarian started out. ‘Yes it will…’

  ‘You’ll have to jump.’

  ‘I’ll jump.’

  Yossarian jumps. The fear; the aliveness; the jump – the first two are the situation, the last the necessity that we all recognise and that few writers anywhere have tackled, none with the wit and vitality of Heller.

  Beat writing is the American writer’s other answer to a life that harries and cheats all of us, Americans and non-Americans alike. But beat writing itself, in spite of the physical free-ranging of the characters it deals with, is curiously lacking in the vigour and demand that really make the rest of us sit up. Beat books remain a kind of spirito-literary Esperanto, in which no real spiritual revolution could find expression.

  Ever since Baudelaire adopted Poe for the French, non-Americans have differed from Americans in their enthusiasm for certain writers, and I think that it is most usually the theme rather than the individual quality of the writer that decides this. The name of Thomas Wolfe, for instance, is likely to bring to the eyes of a non-American the polite gaze that is produced by mention of a book that one ought to have read; or worse, that one was unable to finish. Though A Death in the Family has its following, many people produce the gaze for Agee, too. The preoccupation of these writers with childhood origins, the womb and nest of their personalities, is something that we find wearisome, however (for me, in the case of Agee) exquisitely accurate the findings may be. This obsessively personal quality of some American writing is suspect – whether it has broad, Whitmanesque overtones, or tends to the domestic cosiness that, alas, is creeping into the writing of John Updike, or the shrine-cosiness that now encloses J. D. Salinger.

  Who but an American could have written Advertisements for Myself? Or, having written it, would have given it that title? Even Norman Mailer begins to show that the fatal flaw in his strong but flawed talent may be this obsessive turning in on himself, a rending apart if not a contemplation of the navel. If he is in fact attempting to be America’s first existentialist writer, this tendency points to the unlikelihood that he will succeed. Self-obsession rules out the explicit moral clarity demanded by an existentialist approach; it even rules out the dispassion needed for that existentialist offshoot, a sense of the ‘absurd’.

  We turn away from inspired self-celebration not in the same way as from beat Esperanto, but nevertheless restlessly. This inner restlessness, born of our times rather than ourselves, looks back to the moral isolation of Melville’s Billy Budd and Captain Ahab, and finds its expression in its own events and time, in the bizarre, awful, funny, cruel, crazy lives of Joseph Heller’s Captain Yossarian and Günter Grass’s dwarf with the tin drum. These are the means by which the geis
t of contemporary life seems to be brutally best invoked. This is why, as a writer as well as a reader, I must admit that in a year that brought from America both the hollow-eyed beauty of Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, as uncompromising, in its classic, profoundly disillusioned way, as Heller’s book, I would rather have written Catch-22.

  1963

  A Bolter and the Invincible Summer

  My writing life began long before I left school, and I began to leave school (frequently) long before the recognised time came, so there is no real demarcation, for me, between school and ‘professional’ life. The quotes are there because I think of professional life as something one enters by way of an examination, not as an obsessional occupation like writing for which you provide your own, often extraordinary or eccentric, qualifications as you go along. And I’m not flattered by the idea of being presented with a ‘profession’, honoris causa; every honest writer or painter wants to achieve the impossible and needs no minimum standard laid down by an establishment such as a profession.

  This doesn’t mean that I think a writer doesn’t need a good education in general, and that I don’t wish I had had a better one. But maybe my own regrets arise out of the common impulse to find a justification, outside the limits of one’s own talent, for the limits of one’s achievement.

  I was a bolter, from kindergarten age, but unlike most small children rapidly accustoming their soft, round selves to the sharp angles of desks and discipline, I went on running away from school, year after year. I was a day scholar at a convent in Springs, the Transvaal gold-mining town where we lived, and when I was little I used to hide until I heard the hive of voices start up ‘Our Father’ at prayers, and then I would walk out of the ugly iron gates and spend the morning on the strip of open veld that lay between the township where the school was and the township where my home was. I remember catching white butterflies there, all one summer morning, until, in the quiet when I had no shadow, I heard the school bell, far away, clearly, and I knew I could safely appear at home for lunch. When I was older I used to take refuge for hours in the lavatory block, waiting in the atmosphere of Jeyes’ Fluid for my opportunity to escape. By then I no longer lived from moment to moment, and could not enjoy the butterflies; the past, with the act of running away contained in it, and the future, containing discovery and punishment, made freedom impossible; the act of seizing it was merely a desperate gesture.

  What the gesture meant, I don’t know. I managed my school work easily, and among the girls of the class I had the sort of bossy vitality that makes for popularity; yet I was overcome, from time to time, by what I now can at least label as anxiety states. Speculation about their cause hasn’t much place here, which is lucky, for the people who were around me then are still alive. Autobiography can’t be written until one is old, can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, can’t be sued for libel, or, worse, contradicted.

  There is just one curious aspect of my bolting that seems worth mentioning because it reveals a device of the personality that, beginning at that very time, perhaps, as a dream-defence, an escape, later became the practical subconscious cunning that enabled me to survive and grow in secret while projecting a totally different, camouflage image of myself. I ran away from school; yet there was another school, the jolly, competitive, thrillingly loyal, close-knit world of schoolgirl books, to which I felt that I longed to belong. (At one time I begged to go to boarding school, believing, no doubt, that I should find it there.) Of course, even had it existed, that School Friend world would have been the last place on earth for me. I should have found there, far more insistently, the walls, the smell of serge and floor polish, the pressure of uniformity and the tyranny of bell-regulated time that set off revolt and revulsion in me. What I did not know – and what a child never knows – is that there is more to the world than what is offered to him; more choices than those presented to him; more kinds of people than those (the only ones he knows) to which he feels but dares not admit he does not belong. I thought I had to accept school and all the attitudes there that reflected the attitudes of home; therefore, in order to be a person I had to have some sort of picture of a school that would be acceptable to me; it didn’t seem possible to live without it. Stevie Smith once wrote that all children should be told of the possibility of committing suicide, to console them in case they believed there was no way out of the unbearable; it would be less dramatic but far more consoling if a child could be told that there is an aspect of himself he does not know is permissible.

  The conclusion my bolting school drew from the grown-ups around me was that I was not the studious type and simply should be persuaded to reconcile myself to the minimum of learning. In our small town many girls left school at fifteen or even before. Then, after a six-week course at the local commercial college, a girl was ready for a job as a clerk in a shop or in the offices of one of the gold mines which had brought the town into being. And the typewriter itself merely tapped a mark-time for the brief season of glory, self-assertion and importance that came with the engagement party, the pre-nuptial linen ‘shower’, and culminated not so much in the wedding itself as in the birth, not a day sooner than nine months and three weeks later, of the baby. There wasn’t much point in a girl keeping her head stuck in books anyway; even if she chose to fill the interim with one of the occupations that carried a slightly higher prestige, and were vaguely thought of as artistic – teaching tap-dancing, the piano, or ‘elocution’.

  I suppose I must have been marked out for one of these, because, although I had neither talent nor serious interest in drumming my toes, playing Czerny, or rounding my vowels, I enjoyed using them all as material in my talent for showing off. As I grew towards adolescence I stopped the home concerts and contented myself with mimicking, for the entertainment of one group of my parents’ friends, other friends who were not present. It did not seem to strike those who were that, in their absence, they would change places with the people they were laughing at; or perhaps it did, I do them an injustice, and they didn’t mind.

  All the time it was accepted that I was a candidate for home-dressmaking or elocution whom there was no point in keeping at school too long, I was reading and writing not in secret, but as one does, openly, something that is not taken into account. It didn’t occur to anyone else that these activities were connected with learning, so why should it have occurred to me? And although I fed on the attention my efforts at impersonation brought me, I felt quite differently about any praise or comment that came when my stories were published in the children’s section of a Sunday paper. While I was terribly proud to see my story in print – for only in print did it become ‘real’, did I have proof of the miracle whereby the thing created has an existence of its own – I had a jealous instinct to keep this activity of mine from the handling that would pronounce it ‘clever’ along with the mimicry and the home concerts. It was the beginning of the humble arrogance that writers and painters have, knowing that it is hardly likely that they will ever do anything really good, and not wanting to be judged by standards that will accept anything less. Is this too high-falutin’ a motive to attribute to a twelve-year-old child? I don’t think so. One can have a generalised instinct towards the unattainable long before one has actually met with it. When, not many years later, I read Un Cæur simple or War and Peace – Oh, I knew this was it, without any guidance from the list of the World’s Hundred Best Books that I once tried to read through!

  I started writing at nine, because I was surprised by a poem I produced as a school exercise. The subject prescribed was ‘Paul Kruger’, and although an item of earliest juvenilia, in view of what has happened between people like myself and our country since then, I can’t resist quoting, just for the long-untasted patriotic flavour:

  Noble in heart,

  Noble in mind,

  Never deceitful,

  Never unkind…

  It was the dum-de-de-dum that delighted me rather than the sentiments or the subject. But soon I found that wh
at I really enjoyed was making up a story, and that this was more easily done without the restrictions of dum-de-de-dum. After that I was always writing something, and from the age of twelve or thirteen, often publishing. My children’s stories were anthropomorphic, with a dash of the Edwardian writers’ Pan-cult paganism as it had been shipped out to South Africa in Kenneth Grahame’s books, though already I used the background of mine dumps and veld animals that was familiar to me, and not the European one that provided my literary background, since there were no books about the world I knew. I wrote my elder sister’s essays when she was a student at the Witwatersrand University, and kept up a fair average for her. I entered an essay in the literary section of the Eisteddfod run by the Welsh community in Johannesburg and bought with the prize chit War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, and an Arthur Ransome.

  I was about fourteen then, and a happy unawareness of the strange combination of this choice is an indication of my reading. It was appetite rather than taste, that I had; yet while it took in indiscriminately things that were too much for me, the trash tended to be crowded out and fall away. Some of the books I read in my early teens puzzle me, though. Why Pepys’s Diary? And what made me plod through The Anatomy of Melancholy? Where did I hear of the existence of these books? (That list of the World’s One Hundred Best, maybe.) And once I’d got hold of something like Burton, what made me go on from page to page? I think it must have been because although I didn’t understand all that I was reading, and what I did understand was remote from my experience in the way that easily assimilable romance was not, the half-grasped words dealt with the world of ideas, and so confirmed the recognition, somewhere, of that part of myself that I did not know was permissible.