Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  In prison or out, Abram Fischer maintains a dramatic position in South African life. For some years, circumstances surrounding him have been extraordinary. If Afrikaner Nationalist propagandists present him as the anti-Christ, then, curiously moved to lay aside his socialist rationalism, he has taken upon himself some of their sins in an almost Christlike way. In addressing the court he returned again and again to statements like

  What is not appreciated by my fellow Afrikaner, because he has cut himself off from all contact with non-whites, is that …he is now blamed as an Afrikaner for all the evils and humiliations of apartheid. Hence today the policeman is known as a ‘Dutch’ …When I give an African a lift during a bus boycott, he refuses to believe that I am an Afrikaner …All this has bred a deep-rooted hatred for Afrikaners among non-whites …It demands that Afrikaners themselves should protest openly and clearly against discrimination. Surely there was an additional duty cast on me, that at least one Afrikaner should make this protest actively…

  Those people, including Afrikaner Nationalists, who know Fischer personally have a special affection and respect for him, no matter how anti-Communist they may be. He himself has always shown respect for the right of anyone to work for social reform in his own way, just so long as the obligation is not smugly ignored. No other figure is at once so controversial and so well-liked. Even people who have never been able to understand his adherence to, let alone accept, his socialist views will add: ‘But he is a wonderful person.’ This is due to nothing so superficial as charm – though Fischer has plenty of that; there has been, about Abram Fischer and his wife and children, the particular magnetism of deeply honest lives. Paradoxically, the pull is strong in a country where so many compromises with conscience are made by so many decent citizens.

  In his profession, as well, Fischer has borne something of a charmed life. From the fifties, when political trials got under way in South Africa, he would refuse conventionally important briefs in order to take time to defend rank-and-file Africans, Indians and whites on political charges. Such was his professional prestige that the financial Establishment continued to seek his services as before. From 1958 to 1961 he devoted himself to the defence of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader, and twenty-nine other accused in the first mass political trial that, because it represented so many shades – both skin and ideological – of political thought, became known as ‘the Opposition on trial’. In 1964 Fischer was leading defence counsel at the trial of the ‘High Command’ of combined liberation movements, which had been based at Rivonia, north of Johannesburg. Later that year, his invisible armour was pierced for the first time; he was imprisoned, briefly, under the ninety-day-detention law. And then, in September of 1964 he was arrested, with thirteen others, on five charges including those of being a member and furthering the objects of the Communist Party.

  Because of the esteem in which Fischer was held, his request for bail was supported by many of his legal colleagues and granted by the court, although he had been named chief accused. During the course of the trial, he was even given a temporary passport to enable him to go to London to represent an internationally known pharmaceutical company at the Privy Council. He could expect as much as a five-year sentence at his own trial: would he come back? He had given his word, and he did. Having won the case, he returned discussing the new plays he had seen in the West End, just as if he had come home to face nothing more than the letdown after a holiday.

  He had been in South Africa a month or so when, on 25 January 1965, he disappeared overnight, leaving a letter to the court saying that he was aware that his eventual punishment would be increased by his action, but that he believed it was his duty both to remain in South Africa and to continue to oppose apartheid by carrying on with his political work as long as he was physically able. He referred to his career at the Bar, in relation to the injustice of apartheid upheld by the law: ‘I can no longer serve justice in the way I have attempted to do during the past 30 years. I can do it only in the way I have now chosen.’

  For ten months he eluded a police hunt that poked into every backyard and farmhouse in the country, and brought into detention anyone suspected of being able to blurt out, under persuasion of solitary confinement, Fischer’s whereabouts. On 11 November last year, he was arrested in Johannesburg, thin, bearded, his hair dyed. Except for the eyes, he was unrecognisable as the short but well-set, handsome man with curly white hair that he had been – and was to be again, by the time he appeared in court on 26 January of this year to face fifteen instead of the original five charges against him.

  Why did Abram Fischer abscond? What did he achieve by it? So far as is known, he does not seem to have managed to initiate any significant new political activity while in hiding.

  His fellow white South Africans, the majority of whom are indifferent to the quality of life on the other side of the colour bar, living their comfortable lives in the segregated suburbs where, once, he too had a house with a swimming pool, and among whom, last year, he lived as a fugitive, express strong opinions about what he had done with his life. His colleagues at the Bar, taking the position that absconding from his original trial was conduct unseemly to the dignity of the profession, hurriedly applied within days of his disappearance to have him disbarred. Some people assure themselves that he acted in blind obedience to ‘orders from Moscow’ – the purpose of which they cannot suggest. Well-meaning people who cannot conceive that anyone would sacrifice profession, home, family and ultimately personal liberty for a gesture affirming what he believed to be right, say that the tragic death of his wife, Molly, in a motor accident in 1964, must have disorientated him. Others, who have themselves suffered bans and lost passports as a result of courageous opposition to apartheid, feel that Fischer’s final defiance of the law was a gratuitous act, ending in senseless tragedy: ‘Why has Bram thrown himself away?’

  While Fischer was ‘at large’ for those ten months, some people were saying, ‘Now he is our Mandela.’ (The reference was to the period when Nelson Mandela escaped a police net for more than a year, travelled abroad, and worked among his people from ‘underground’.) In the jails last year (where there were more than three thousand political prisoners), when African politicals were allowed to see anybody, their first question was commonly not about their families but whether ‘Bram’ was still ‘all right’. And a few days before sentence was to be passed on him, an African couple begged his daughter to let them borrow one of his suits, so that a witch doctor might use it in a spell to influence the judge to give a deferred sentence.

  For the Fischer family, 1964–5 was a year to turn distraught any but the most tough and selfless minds. It has since become clear that, as defence counsel at the Rivonia Trial, Fischer had to muster the nerve and daring to handle evidence that might at any moment involve himself. Directly after the trial, he and his wife were driving to Cape Town to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of their daughter Ilse, a student at the University of Cape Town, and to enable Fischer to visit Mandela and the other convicted trial defendants imprisoned off the coast on Robben Island, when his car plunged into a deep pool by the side of the road and Molly Fischer was drowned.

  The Fischers have always been an exceptionally devoted family, sharing as well as family love a working conviction that daily life must realise in warm, human action any theoretical condemnation of race discrimination. In Molly Fischer the very real tradition of Afrikaner hospitality triumphantly burst the barriers it has imposed on itself; her big house was open to people of all races, and, unmindful of what the neighbours would say, she and her husband brought up along with their own daughters and son an orphaned African child.

  Molly Fischer taught Indian children, worked with women’s non-racial movements and spent five months in prison, detained without trial, during the 1960 State of Emergency. At her huge funeral people of all races mourned together, as if apartheid did not exist. No one who saw him at that time can forget the terrible courage with which F
ischer turned loss into concern for the living; neither could they confuse this with the workings of an unhinged mind. Almost at once, he set out again for Cape Town to visit the men on Robben Island.

  If one wants to speculate why he disappeared in the middle of his trial and yet stayed in South Africa, fully aware that when, inevitably, he was caught he would incur greatly increased punishment, one must surely also ask oneself why, when, he was allowed to go abroad while on bail, he ever came back. Some friends half hoped he wouldn’t; a government supporter nervously remarked that there was nothing to stop Fischer turning up at The Hague, where, at the time, the World Court was hearing the question of South Africa’s right to impose apartheid on the mandated territory of South West Africa (Namibia). There would have been no extradition, but a hero’s role for him there.

  People of different backgrounds who know Fischer best seem to agree that what brought him back from Europe and what made him turn fugitive were one and the same thing, the touchstone of his personality: absolute faith in human integrity. It seems reasonable to conclude that he came back because he believed that this integrity was mutual and indivisible – he believed he would never be betrayed by the people with whom he was working in opposition to apartheid, and, in turn, he owed them the guarantee of his presence.

  As for the ‘gesture’ of the ten months he spent in hiding, he has given, in court, his own answer to those fellow citizens – legal colleagues, firms, enemies, the white people of South Africa – who seek to judge him:

  It was to keep faith with all those dispossessed by apartheid that I broke my undertaking to the court, separated myself from my family, pretended I was someone else, and accepted the life of a fugitive. I owed it to the political prisoners, to the banished, to the silenced and to those under house arrest not to remain a spectator, but to act. I knew what they expected of me, and I did it. I felt responsible, not to those who are indifferent to the sufferings of others, but to those who are concerned. I knew that by valuing, above all, their judgment, I would be condemned by people who are content to see themselves as respectable and loyal citizens. I cannot regret any such condemnation that may follow me.

  The judge sentenced him to prison ‘for life’ and, while others wept, Fischer himself received the pronouncement with fortitude. No one can guess what goes on in a man’s mind when he hears such words; but perhaps Abram Fischer, sitting it out in prison, now, may ask himself, taking courage, ‘Whose life? Theirs – the government’s – or mine?’

  1966

  Postscript: In prison Fischer suffered terminal cancer and when the news became public there was a campaign for his release. He left prison in 1975 under house arrest at the home of a relative as permission was refused for him to abide by this restriction at his daughters’ home. He died on 8 May that year and his ashes were forbidden to be given into the daughters’ possession lest they would become an object of political pilgrimage.

  The Short Story in South Africa

  Why is it that while the death of the novel is good for post-mortem at least once a year, the short story lives on unmolested? It cannot be because – to borrow their own jargon – literary critics regard it as merely a minor art form. Most of them, if pressed, would express the view that it is a highly specialised and skilful form, closer to poetry, etc. But they would have to be pressed; otherwise they wouldn’t bother to discuss it at all. When Chekhov crops up, it is as a playwright, and Katherine Mansfield is a period personality from the Lady Chatterley set. Yet no one suggests that we are practising a dead art form. And, like a child suffering from healthy neglect, the short story survives.

  ‘To say that no one now much likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find pleasure in prose fictions prefer movies, television, journalism, and books of “fact”,’ Gore Vidal wrote recently (Encounter, December 1967). If the cinema and television have taken over so much of the novel’s territory, just as photography forced painting into wastelands which may or may not be made to bloom, hasn’t the short story been overrun, too? This symposium is shop talk and it would seem unnecessary for us to go over the old definitions of where and how the short story differs from the novel, but the answer to the question must lie somewhere here. Both novel and story use the same material: human experience. Both have the same aim: to communicate it. Both use the same medium: the written word. There is a general and recurrent dissatisfaction with the novel as a means of netting ultimate reality – another term for the quality of human life – and inevitably there is even a tendency to blame the tools: words have become hopelessly blunted by overuse, dinned to death by admen, and, above all, debased by political creeds that have twisted and changed their meaning. Various ways out have been sought.

  In England, a return to classicism in technique and a turning to the exoticism of sexual aberration and physical and mental abnormality as an extension of human experience and therefore of subject matter; in Germany and America, a splendid abandon in making a virtue of the vice of the novel’s inherent clumsiness by stuffing it not with nineteenth-century horsehair narrative but twentieth-century anecdotal-analytical plastic foam; in France, the ‘laboratory novel’ struggling to get away from the anthropocentric curse of the form and the illusion of depth of the psychological novel, and landing up very much where Virginia Woolf was, years ago, staring at the mark on the wall. Burroughs has invented the reader-participation novel. For the diseased word, George Steiner has even suggested silence.

  If the short story is alive while the novel is dead, the reason must lie in approach and method. The short story as a form and as a kind of creative vision must be better equipped to attempt the capture of ultimate reality at a time when (whichever way you choose to see it) we are drawing nearer to the mystery of life or are losing ourselves in a bellowing wilderness of mirrors, as the nature of that reality becomes more fully understood or more bewilderingly concealed by the discoveries of science and the proliferation of communication media outside the printed word.

  Certainly the short story always has been more flexible and open to experiment than the novel. Short-story writers always have been subject at the same time to both a stricter technical discipline and a wider freedom than the novelist. Short-story writers have known – and solved by nature of their choice of form – what novelists seem to have discovered in despair only now: the strongest convention of the novel, prolonged coherence of tone, to which even the most experimental of novels must conform unless it is to fall apart, is false to the nature of whatever can be grasped of human reality. How shall I put it? Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of – the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point. How the characters will appear, think, behave, comprehend, tomorrow or at any other time in their lives, is irrelevant. A discrete moment of truth is aimed at – not the moment of truth, because the short story doesn’t deal in cumulatives.

  The problem of how best to take hold of ultimate reality, from the technical and stylistic point of view, is one that the short-story writer is accustomed to solving specifically in relation to an area – event, mental state, mood, appearance – which is heightenedly manifest in a single situation. Take fantasy for an example. Writers are becoming more and more aware of the waviness of the line that separates fantasy from the so-called rational in human perception. It is recognised that fantasy is no more than a shift in angle; to put it another way, the rational is simply another, the most obvious, kind of fantasy. Writers turn to the l
ess obvious fantasy as a wider lens on ultimate reality. But this fantasy is something that changes, merges, emerges, disappears as a pattern does viewed through the bottom of a glass. It is true for the moment when one looks down through the glass; but the same vision does not transform everything one sees, consistently throughout one’s whole consciousness. Fantasy in the hands of short-story writers is so much more successful than when in the hands of novelists because it is necessary for it to hold good only for the brief illumination of the situation it dominates. In the series of developing situations of the novel the sustainment of the tone of fantasy becomes a high-pitched ringing in the reader’s ears. How many fantasy novels achieve what they set out to do: convey the shift and change, to and fro, beneath, above and around the world of appearances? The short story recognises that full comprehension of a particular kind in the reader, like full apprehension of a particular kind in the writer, is something of limited duration. The short story is a fragmented and restless form, a matter of hit or miss, and it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern consciousness – which seems best expressed as flashes of fearful insight alternating with near-hypnotic states of indifference.

  These are technical and stylistic considerations. Marxist criticism sees the survival of an art form in relation to social change. What about the socio-political implications of the short story’s survival? George Lukács has said that the novel is a bourgeois art form whose enjoyment presupposes leisure and privacy. It implies the living room, the armchair, the table lamp; just as epic implies the illiterates round the tribal story-teller, and Shakespeare implies the two audiences – that of the people and that of the court – of a feudal age. From this point of view the novel marks the apogee of an exclusive, individualist culture; the nearest it ever got to a popular art form (in the sense of bringing people together in direct participation in an intellectually stimulating experience) was the nineteenth-century custom of reading novels aloud to the family. Here again it would seem that the short story shares the same disadvantages as the novel. It is an art form solitary in communication; yet another sign of the increasing loneliness and isolation of the individual in a competitive society. You cannot enjoy the experience of a short story unless you have certain minimum conditions of privacy in which to read it; and these conditions are those of middle-class life. But of course a short story, by reason of its length and its completeness, totally contained in the brief time you give to it, depends less than the novel upon the classic conditions of middle-class life, and perhaps corresponds to the break-up of that life which is taking place. In that case, although the story may outlive the novel, it may become obsolete when the period of disintegration is replaced by new social forms and the art forms that express them. One doesn’t have to embrace the dreariness of conventional ‘social realism’ in literature to grant this. That our age is thrashing about desperately for a way out of individual human isolation, and that our present art forms are not adequate to it, is obvious to see in all the tatty dressing-up games, from McLuhan’s theories to pop art, in which we seek a substitute for them.