Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  This symposium is also concerned with the short story as a means of earning a living. I’d like to say here that I have never understood why writers are always asked bluntly what they earn (as if we were children, whose pocket money must be flatteringly exclaimed over) while businessmen would never be expected to reveal the intimacies of tax return and bank balance. I’d like to think that this is because they know we’re after something more than money; and it’s that they’re not old enough to know about …Snobberies aside, writing stories is generally regarded as the most unlikely way of earning money, only just less hopeless than writing poetry. It goes without saying that publishers nurture their short-story writers mainly in the hope that they will write novels sooner or later. And yet I believe that writers of short stories (I’m not talking about popular hacks, of course) have more chance of working without compromise than novelists have. The novel that doesn’t sell represents anything from one to five years’ work – years that, economically speaking, then, the locusts have eaten. If a short story doesn’t find a home (and sometimes one’s more interesting stories must wait until the particular review or anthology, in which their quality is recognised, comes along), it does not represent the same loss in terms of working time. Other stories have been written within the same few months or the same year that enable the writer to go on eating. The novelist whose book sells poorly may have to turn to some other means of earning, during the next few years while he is writing (or would like to write) another novel – the journalism, teaching, etc., that takes him away from the only work he really cares to do. The short-story writer, with less capital tied up over a long period of time, as it were, has a better chance of keeping the integrity of assiduity to his own work. Also, once out of the best-seller class (and this would include a majority of serious novels, and virtually all experimental ones) a novel is dead, so far as sales are concerned, after a year. A short-story collection often represents stories that before book publication have earned money through individual publication in magazines, and which will continue to earn, long after publication and sale of the book, through individual publication in anthologies. I know that certain stories of mine are still earning money for me, fifteen years after they were written.

  Although my novels have always sold better, initially, than my story collections, and now and then I have had unexpected wind-falls from novels (mainly through translations), I think I can say that my short stories have provided my bread-and-butter earnings. (And this despite the fact that there are two of the highest-paying American magazines to whom my work is not offered, because I should not like to see it published in them.) Of course, part of the reason is that quite a large number of my stories have been published in The New Yorker. My living as a short-story writer has been earned almost entirely in America. In England, only Encounter and London Magazine regularly publish stories of quality, for which the payment is meagre. Sporadically – apparently for prestige – one of the Sunday newspaper colour magazines buys a story for a more realistic sum – say £80 or £90: about the level of an American literary review. No story-writer could write only what he pleased and continue to eat, in England. In my own country, South Africa, both the limited size of the publishing industry and the limited size and tastes of the reading public would make it impossible for any serious writer to live off local earnings. And yet – such is the resilience and obstinacy of short-story writers – almost all the interesting fiction written by local Africans (not white South Africans) has taken the form of short stories.

  In literature, the short story has always been a small principality. If threatened, it seems to me still remarkably independent, gloriously eccentric, adventurous and free. After all, in the last few years, Ingeborg Bachman wrote ‘Among Murderers and Madmen’, Borges wrote ‘The Handwriting of God’, and LeClézio wrote his ‘little madnesses’, including ‘It Seems to Me the Boat Is Heading for the Island’.

  1968

  Madagascar

  A four-letter word brought me to Madagascar. Not the usual sort. A single word in the local tongue. I read that in the Malagasy language the world ‘lolo’ means both ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’, identifying the chrysalis with the shrouded corpse, and the butterfly that emerges from it with the soul from the body of the dead. A people who could express the concepts of resurrection and the eternal renewal of life in a single image conjured up by one short word – they took a hold on my mind. That was why I went to their island in the Indian Ocean, which otherwise had attracted me neither more nor less than the dozens of others floating about the warm seas of the world under the general heading of Island Paradise: a time-spotted Gauguinesque romanticism that seems to survive for all except the inhabitants themselves, now flying the flags of their doll-sized independent nations and hoping for the discovery of offshore oil or on-shore uranium.

  Island Paradise sources of information labelled Madagascar the Great Red Island; home of the gryphon; fourth biggest island in the world. Flying over it at last, I was not surprised to find that it was, of course, not red at all: a deep, contused glow in the skin of mountains and hills cosmically wrinkled below, a flush the colour of purplish jasper that came up under the thinning grass of the dry season. Amber rivers opaque with mud moving strongly in U-curves along the valleys, roads (where there are any at all) following the same line of looping low resistance, the colour of powdered rust. As for size – while I zigzagged about the island either on land or by air (a thousand miles from end to end, three hundred and sixty across at the broadest point) with climate and landscape constantly changing, what became a reality for me was a pocket continent. And as for the poor giant gryphon bird whose last known egg, holding more than two gallons of omelette ingredient, was taken to Paris for exhibit in 1850 – the present wild-life population of lemurs proved so elusive that they might just as well have been extinct along with her. But the people were there. The Malagasy, of whose language I went knowing just one word, were not at all elusive and very much alive in the tenth year of their independence both as one of the former French colonies still under the skirts of the French Community, and as a member state of the Organisation of African Unity.

  Wherever you fly in from, you alight on Madagascar at the capital, Antananarivo, four thousand feet up on the high plateau among the ribbed shapes of shining rice paddies. The island lies 250 miles across the Mozambique Channel from the south-east coast of Africa and was once probably joined to it; no one really knows. No one knows either where exactly the inhabitants came from and when, although ethnologists presume it was from the south-west Pacific in the succession of migrations from some centuries before the birth of Christ until the fifteenth century. The first thing you notice in Antananarivo is how strikingly Polynesian as opposed to African their descendants, the people in the streets, the Merina, look, and the Merina’s language, which over the centuries and through their long political dominance has become the language even of the coastal tribes who have an admixture of negroid and Arab blood, is a Malayo-Polynesian dialect full of repeated syllables and long names beautiful to look at but hellish to remember. The first Merina king recorded by colonial history has a prize one: Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka. Known now as Andrianampoinimerina, it was under his rule in the eighteenth century that the Imerina kingdom began to extend its sovereignty over lesser tribal kingdoms of the island. Among the portraits of the Merina dynasty I saw hanging in the palace complex that is still perched above Antananarivo city, his picture is the only one that shows a ‘native’ king – naked except for a loin-kilt, feather in hair, spear in hand. When he died in 1810 his son Radama I welcomed the English and French, primarily in the hope of using the white man to help him complete the Merina conquest of the island. The portraits of all succeeding monarchs show dark-skinned queens and princes in Napoleonic satin and Victorian hour-glass velvet: the white man, in the form of the rival influences of France and England, had begun to use them.

  Of course the riff-raff of the white world
– pirates such as John Avery and William Kidd – had found the Madagascar coast a useful base, the Portuguese had discovered it in 1500 and abandoned their trading posts there two hundred years later, the Arabs had made foot-hold settlements as early as the seventh century and the French chartered companies of Louis XIV’s reign had unsuccessfully attempted to colonise the south-east coast. But on Madagascar just as on the continent of Africa itself, it was in the nineteenth century that Europe’s acquisitive scramble for colonies really began. France and Britain bristled at each other half-heartedly for years over ‘influence’ with the Merina; neither seems seriously to have wanted to take on the place. Their fortunes at the Merina court rose and fell, often promoted unofficially by eccentric individuals like the extraordinary Jean Laborde, a shipwrecked blacksmith who became Queen Ranavalona I’s favourite and taught the Merina to make cannon, textiles, paper and sugar, and Cameron, a Scot, who is responsible for having fossilised the charming wooden palace in its present stone carapace. The French and English were alternately welcomed and rebuffed. Which power would take over the island finally was decided in the casual way European powers handed out other people’s countries among themselves in those days of piously professed concern for the poor heathen: England swopped her chances in Madagascar in exchange for a hands-off Egypt on the part of France.

  Nobody asked the Malagasy how they felt about being disposed of by this gentlemen’s agreement; there were several Franco–Malagasy wars before France annexed Madagascar in 1896.

  Tsihy be lambanana ny ambanilanitra – Men form one great mat

  For nearly a century before the French conquest, the Merina had ruled the greater part of the island from Antananarivo. Now that the French have gone, unlike so many capitals on the African mainland it is not a white man’s town from which the inhabitants have decamped; it’s what it always was, long before the white man came – the island’s own metropolis. It has grown more in the last ten years than in the preceding fifty, and in the new quarters of Ampefiloha there are the big apartment blocks of international middle-class living, but the lifestyle of the city radiates from the daily market – the zoma – of the Analakely quarter to which the splendid boulevard of the Avenue de l’Indépendance leads theatrically, overlooked by the haute ville, the hill faced with tall houses in smudgy pastels all the way up to the queen’s palace. A wide flight of steps debouches into the blue and white umbrellas of the market from either side of the city; walking down the Escalier de Lastelle from my hotel on my first morning, I felt I was making an entrance of some sort. Indeed, it was Friday and the show was on. Every Friday the zoma bursts out and spreads down the entire length of the Avenue de l’Indépendance for the full width of the sidewalks and the arcades of the conventional shops.

  No wonder the Merina – those makers of enviable imagery – visualise human interdependence in terms of weaving. Although the zoma stalls sell everything from furniture to horoscopes and rose quartz, from delicious oysters to dried octopus like stiff old gloves, and medicinal ingredients that looked as if they might quite possibly be the tongues of newts, what most people were selling was made of straw. Impossible to catalogue so many different objects woven in so many ways out of different kinds of straw – rice, maize, palm, banana-leaf, raffia. There’s nothing more satisfying to buy than something made of straw; it’s beautiful, cheap, and cannot last – thus gratifying the eye, the desire to get something for nothing, and leaving one free of the guilt of laying up treasures less ephemeral than the flesh.

  And picking a way through the weavers’ stalls was also to become threaded into the great mat of people who were trading or buying. A quarter of a million live in Antananarivo; most of them seemed to be in the streets, but it was not noisy and nobody jostled – if anyone did, nobody lost his temper. The Merina, whether or not they have adopted Western dress (all the women have), still wear the lamba, a long cloth, usually white but sometimes a surprising saffron, draped Mexican-style across the shoulders. It looked very fine with ordinary trousers and jacket, and on women with babies enveloped the baby head and all against the mother’s body. Malagasy babies must feel extremely secure in this intermediary stage between the womb and the world.

  Every man was wearing a hat, and everyone who wanted to look a man – that is, every little barefoot urchin. A straw hat of course, and usually sombrero-shaped. The sombrero and the poncho are a dashing combination: but the Merina are not dashing at all, on them this outfit confers a sombre dignity. If there is anything definitively un-African about them apart from their looks, it is this quiet demeanour. In place of black ebullience, brown calm.

  I was in a taxi one day when it was almost run down by another. The two drivers, eye to eye through glass, paused for a long moment. No word, no gesture from either. We drove on. Are there no curses in Malagasy? Even if there are not, neither driver resorted to the riches of French invective. In place of temperament, withdrawal.

  Zanahary ambonin’ny tany – Gods on earth

  It turned out that the one word I knew was a key one. For the Malagasy, both the Merina of the high plateau and the côtiers – the coastal tribes – the dead are part of life. Lolo is dead soul ghosting the earth, and living butterfly. The lamba is precisely the same garment as the shroud. In ancient times there was a civilisation stretching from the Indian Ocean to Melanesia, based on the cult of the dead and the cultivation of rice. The ancestors of the Merina brought from the Pacific the art of cultivating rice in irrigated paddies, and possibly the cult of the dead along with it. Both have survived into the present day. The dead are believed to be the sole source of happiness, peace, and above all, fertility. The greatest virtue for a Malagasy lies in actual physical contact with the corpse; during the dry season from May to September, as often over the years as they can afford it, the family gathers, sometimes from great distances, at the family tomb to exhume the bodies, give them fresh shrouds and a breath of air, and celebrate their presence with drinking and feasting. Christian conversion (about 40 per cent of the population practise Christianity) and conversion to Islam (about 5 per cent are Moslem) have been accommodated to the custom by the Malagasy instead of resulting in its abolition. President Philibert Tsiranana’s democratic government, which would prefer people’s energies to be directed to raising production as a means of attaining peace, happiness, fertility, etc., has to tread delicately in its efforts to discourage it.

  I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to join the party at an exhumation. But I did want to see the tombs, whether the occupants were taking the air or not, because the cult has given rise to an extraordinary religious art – grave sculptures in wood. I knew that the best examples were to be seen far from Antananarivo, in the south, near the west coast ports of Tuléar and Morondava. The charming and helpful Malagasy in Antananarivo were unexpectedly discouraging when I said I would go by car – why not fly? I would settle for Morondava, then, if Tuléar was too far to drive. I was a bit puzzled when it was calculated that Morondava – only 250 miles – would take as long to reach, but didn’t want to listen to any more objections, and set off in a new hired French car with a skilful Malagasy driver on a route marked as a national highway. We did get there – after two days, the second a knuckle-whitening climb over the spine of the island and down through the mountains by way of stony gullies, carrying our own petrol and always hoping the next bridge wouldn’t be down. My apprehension was put to shame by the fairly frequent appearance of small shoe-box-shaped buses, marked taxi brousse (bush taxi) that rocked by, crowded with serene faces. Anyway I had jolted into me unforgettably that the greatest need of the island is roads. It has one of the best networks of internal air services in the world – used by foreign businessmen, government officials and visitors. Air tickets are far beyond the pocket of the average Malagasy, and apart from the line connecting Antananarivo with the principal port, Tamatave, there are only a few strips of railroad. If half the country’s 1963–73 development plan funds have been earmarked for the improvement of tr
ansport, there’s not much to show for the money so far on Highway 24.