Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  In her sexual and emotional relationships Simone de Beauvoir seems again to have managed to achieve the best of both worlds. A lifelong bond with ‘the man whom I placed above all others’, plus two deep and passionate love affairs which left the bond untouched; this compact of ‘contingent love’ has proved the best of marriages. Like any Joan sitting with her Darby (Simone de Beauvoir, in her late fifties, sees herself in old age) she wonders, now, which one of them will ‘go’ first, and how shall the survivor bear it? Apart from their lifelong dialogue, they have had a silent understanding that persisted without a break in communication even when travelling abroad in a foursome composed of themselves, her lover and his mistress. Only once does she admit to suffering fear and feeling threatened by Sartre’s relationship with a woman and soon the solemnity of the unsolemnised marriage won out for her. As for her own grand passions, both seem to have ended in special friendships and the secret consolation that although he wished it, she wouldn’t marry Nelson Algren, and Lanzmann was born a generation too late to provide more for her than, in her middle forties, a highly gratifying second spring. She is a woman who has been loved by three men; and in freedom; without yielding an inch or hour of ‘the autonomy that has been bestowed on me by a profession which means so much to me’. She has not allowed herself to be forced to assume, on the side, the domestic obligations in one form or another that follow hot on the love-talk for most intellectual women as for all others, except perhaps the wealthy bourgeoise whom she despises. That’s no mean achievement. Even the man who is the peer of an intellectual woman fails to see why he, just as well as she, should wash his shirt. Sartre must be the exception. Of course, he has lived at home with his mother quite a lot of the time.

  De Beauvoir may have avoided washing his shirts, but she has constantly been accused of wearing his opinions. She gives quite a lot of space to refuting this. If, as she seems to think, the allegation comes from the old anti-feminist guard, why grant it so much attention? They have long since lost the power to ‘draw’ her when they touch upon other aspects of her life. If, on the other hand, she is accused without prejudice, as an intellectual, of being unduly under the influence of the thought of another, and one takes her refutation in this context, fair enough. We can accept that we cannot know the extent to which these two very different – we can tell that, from their books, without any explanation from her – minds have interacted; the trouble is that her autobiography provides circumstantial evidence that Words, confined to that ‘poodle of the future’, the infant Sartre, cannot. And there’s not much reason to believe, on the evidence of Words, populated entirely by Sartre himself in the many avatars of childhood fantasy (grandfather, mother, schoolmaster: chair, table, lamp, on an empty stage set for his performances), that later volumes of his autobiography will find it necessary to admit other people. (This is not a criticism, but the description of a method. With her, you are under the clock on the street corner, always at the point at which she meets the world; with him, you are in that interior being to which he has carried away the world’s phenomena.) Throughout her book, Simone de Beauvoir has an irritating habit of writing ‘we thought’, when surely, since this is her own story she is telling, her own development, however closely entwined with another’s, that she is describing, she ought to be writing ‘I thought’. For the purposes of this particular narrative. Sartre simply happens to hold the same opinion.

  ‘It was not of my own free will … that I allowed the war in Algeria to invade my thoughts, my sleep, my every mood.’

  Almost exactly halfway through Force of Circumstance this invasion begins. By the time the last page is reached, it has established itself as the definitive experience of the writer’s life. It is a destruction, not a culmination; and that is the real reason why this woman, who can say ‘when I look back over the past, there is no-one I envy’, at the same time ends her book in despair.

  For as it turned out, it has been the Algerian war and not the Resistance that has proved to be the testing-ground for de Beauvoir’s beliefs and convictions, and most of her loyalties. Looked back upon, the Resistance (with which one can’t deny she identified herself absolutely, even if, as her detractors point out, she was not herself active in the movement) was a period of blessed moral certitude; the enemy might have been in Occupation, but came from Without. There were collaborators, of course, but they were not drawn from the ranks of her friends. It still meant something to be a Frenchwoman; one did not have to repudiate one’s heritage of the nation’s whole past – from its intellectual tradition to its gastronomy – because of the present this resulted in. The touchstone of socialist principles was lodged in what a man said and did and thought then, in relation to the Germans, and not in relation to how he would think or write or act in other forms of social conflict. It was possible to belong to the Left and not be a Communist, without being reviled by the Right or scorned by the Communist, because if the Underground was a battlefield it was also an area of agreement. For those years the forces of human regression wore the same face for all: the face of the German soldier. And after the war there was a brief honeymoon of the Peace when Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, in common with others, felt that the moral force that had been put up against that face would now be hurled against all the other horrors bobbing in the human coconut-shy; there would be a new France, if not a new world.

  They considered themselves socialists and the future was, by definition, socialism. Yet neither would join the Communist Party; she was ‘close to the Communists certainly, because of my horror of all that they were fighting against; but I loved truth too much not to demand the freedom to seek it as I wished’. As for Sartre, she insists that ‘a dialogue (with the Communists) was possible’; nevertheless, soon after the war he was already experiencing an ironic situation that was to continue for most of his life: the Communists used, as a stick to beat him with, the interpretation of his thought taken up by the Right – ‘the bourgeois public interpreted Existentialism as a spare, emergency ideology. The Communists took the same view.’ This classic form of punishment reserved for the fellow traveller has been the lot of both de Beauvoir and Sartre for a good distance on the long road that has led ‘the jackal with a fountain pen’ (Sartre, as once described by a Communist) finally to the accolade from Castro and (surely not so pleasant) the arms of Surkov. There have been some casualties on the way, particularly in the fields of literary judgement and private friendship. The latter are inevitable; you have to lose some friends if you want to keep your convictions. But the former make one shake one’s head: is Simone de Beauvoir really content with the political priggery of her appraisal of The Rebel as ‘a statement of his [Camus’s] solidarity with bourgeois values’?

  If de Beauvoir and her man have at last won from the Communists the recognition of their position ‘close to’ but not within the Party, it hasn’t come about through that ‘dialogue’ she was convinced was possible, but as a result of their stand throughout the Algerian war. For her, at least, although she does not say so, it must be like receiving a citation whose words can hold little of what really happened. ‘…the horror my [the middle] class inspires in me has been brought to white heat by the Algerian war’: it was not that her experience of that war went deeper than her politics, but that her political convictions found their depth in her experience of that war.

  Other things central to her being were put to the test by the same event – love of country, even love of life. The first did not survive; the second seems damaged beyond healing. All through the last half of this volume the record of destruction grows.

  What did appal me was to see the vast majority of the French people turn chauvinist and to realize the depths of their racist attitude. Whole battalions were looting, burning, raping, massacring. Torture was being used as the normal and indispensable method of obtaining information …My compatriots did not want to know anything about all this …no-one turned a hair.

  And yet

  Every evening a senti
mental audience wept over the past misfortunes of little Anne Frank; but all the children in agony …at that moment in a supposedly French country were something they preferred to ignore. If you had attempted to stir up pity for them [Algerian children] you would have been accused of lowering the nation’s morale. This hypocrisy, this indifference, this country, my own self, were no longer bearable to me. All those people in the streets, in open agreement [with the war] or battered into a stupid submission – they were all murderers, all guilty. Myself as well. ‘I’m French.’ The words scalded my throat like an admission of a hideous deformity. For millions of men and women …I was just one of the people who were torturing them …I deserved their hatred because I could still sleep, write, enjoy a walk or a book.

  …I had been labelled, along with several others, anti-French. I became so. I could no longer bear my fellow citizens …At the cinema we had to swallow newsreels showing the fine work the French were doing in Algeria …Just having coffee at a counter or going into a bakery became an ordeal …I had liked crowds once; now even the streets were hostile to me. I felt dispossessed as I had when the Occupation began. It was even worse, because, whether I wanted to be or not, I was an accomplice of these people I couldn’t bear to be in the same street with. That was what I could least forgive. Or else they should have trained me from childhood to be an SS, a para, instead of giving me a Christian, democratic, humanist conscience: a conscience …I was seeing myself through the eyes of women who had been raped twenty times, of men with broken bones, of crazed children: a Frenchwoman.

  If hell is seeing horrors done in one’s name, then many of us have been down there with her. ‘I’m French.’ ‘I’m German.’ For me, a South African, ‘I’m white.’ As a testament of the shaking of the foundations of individual existence in this situation, this autobiography has no rival I have read. Simone de Beauvoir’s sorrowful sense of disgust with life is surely not so much the inability to accept an ageing body, as the other kind of self-loathing that comes from having to accept that for years one has no longer been able to bear one’s fellow citizens. Let this stand against the judgement of some French critics that the sorrow is the confession of the failure of a philosophy, and against the world’s jealous insistence that a woman so brilliant, celebrated, and (by now) even rich, ought to arrive at a different reckoning.

  1966

  One Man Living Through It

  My memory for the sequence of events in getting to know people is bad – the preliminaries tend to run together into the colour and quality of the relationship that develops. But I do remember clearly the first time I met Nat Nakasa. It was perhaps seven years ago and I was expecting Lewis Nkosi. He brought with him that day a round-faced boy who, faced with the prospect of being left alone to amuse himself while Lewis and I went off for a private talk, said, just as if there were not plenty of books and papers in the room – ‘Haven’t you got any records I can play?’ He was not ill at ease, but carried the youthful confidence in his own interests that marks the city-bred. Here was someone who would skid through the conventions of white houses as nippily as, a few years earlier, he would weave a bicycle in and out of the stream of Durban’s big cars.

  I knew he must mean jazz records, and felt he would find mine meagre and ‘commercial’, but I gave them to him. And when Lewis and I came back to the room he was stretched full-length in a chair, attentive to the music and inoffensively indifferent to both our absence and return.

  That was Nat, newly arrived in Johannesburg. That was Nat at the beginning of the period he describes in an essay ‘Johannesburg, Johannesburg’. That was the period of no fixed abode. And yet he was going somewhere; by the very nature of the way he was living, he was set upon the only course that was valid for him: the course of independent self-realisation. Although I barely recognise that boy sitting in the chair stirring his toes inside his shoes to the beat, just as I barely recognise the man who ended his own life early one summer morning in New York, both were part of the young man who became my close friend. So do the limits of human relationships constantly fling us back; so do one’s hands fall, helpless, before the quintessential loneliness of each human being. It is keeping this in mind that I write of him, respecting the ultimate despair that took him beyond the understanding of friends, aware that what each of us knows of him was only part of what he was, and lived, and suffered, and that even when we have put it all together there will always be something – perhaps the unbearable sum of the total in itself? – that he kept to himself and died of.

  I saw quite a lot of Nat at parties or when friends simply gravitated together to talk, but it was when he launched out into the founding of the Classic, a defiant literary journal, and I became a member of the small committee formed to help him run it, that he was drawn into the working life of our house. He heard squabbles and learned private jokes. He lost his fear of the bulldog and endured its smelly presence at his feet; he was asked to pick up a schoolboy from the bus stop or to buy a pint of milk while on the way from town. The process is known as becoming one of the family and it implies chores as well as privileges. He and I found that one of the times that suited both of us best, if we had Classic matters to work on, was about two o’clock in the afternoon. Very often he would rush in then, carrying his bulging attaché case, and we would eat bread and cheese on the verandah in the sun, laughing a lot (he was a brilliant mimic) and getting on with the work at the same time. His social instincts were sure, and even in easy friendship he never lost his precise judgement of exactly the time to get up and go. He always seemed to sense when you had work or some other preoccupation that you must get back to. This leads me, only now, while writing, to realise that I never ever remember him being a bore. He didn’t even have those moments of recurring tediousness on pet subjects that most of us have. Sensitivity is a term whose mention may itself cause a suppressed yawn, but the fact is that he was too sensitive to be a bore. Too conscious, in the best and most open way, of the feelings of other people. And this reminds one how, on the last evening of his life, when in all his final anguish of mind he talked until late with his friend Jack Thomson and his wife, he had still some instinct that made him shrink from burdening them with the mention of his impulse to suicide.

  Nat’s approach to the Classic was serious and yet light-hearted, candid and unflustered. He was a clever young newspaperman but had no literary background or experience – yes. There was not enough money for the venture and there were endless practical difficulties – yes. But he felt that day-to-day journalism floated, like oil indicating the presence of a submarine, on the surface of African life, and he wanted to make soundings of his own. He asked for help, and what’s more, he did so aware that help more often than not must take the form of criticism, and in the self-knowledge that he could take that, too. As for money, he managed as best he could with what there was; and as for the other difficulties, he dealt with them with what I am prepared to say is a particularly African resilience, vigorously born of harsh necessity, early on.

  One of the practical difficulties was that it was hard to get white printers (our first one, certainly) to accept that this black man was the editor and not a white editor’s office boy. Nat’s manner with the man was amusing and highly successful – he treated him kindly but firmly as someone who has had a nasty shock, but really not so bad, after all, and wasn’t he getting used to it, wasn’t he feeling better already? Nat did not do as well with the wife, an ink-haired, flour-faced lady sitting up among her invoices on a high stool, like a grim madame in a late-nineteenth-century French painting, but he had the husband confiding his business troubles to him, and almost calling him ‘Mr Nakasa’…

  He would bring to me a manuscript that he liked particularly, to share the pleasure of it, and he brought me those whose interest or quality he felt uncertain about. If he was strongly in favour of something, he would publish it anyway, no matter what anyone thought of it. He had read no poetry outside a school primer and I often told him that som
e poems he considered publishing in the magazine were rubbish.

  He would say, ‘Oh. Well, why?’ And would force me to state the grounds of my attack, line by line. Sometimes he would come back days later – scratching down through the nest of dog-eared manuscripts in the attaché case – and dig out one of the same poems over again.