Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The man is the young Father Trevor Huddleston. He is listening to and looking at someone you can’t make out – a faint lick of light touching knuckles and thumb held towards the fire, a shirt collar framing the knot of a tie, and above that a shape almost one with the night, unrecognisable as a face. But the man, the black man, is there; he is there in the extraordinary, still, self-excluding attention of the young priest. Trevor Huddleston’s immense awareness of black people, in a city and country and time when white people ignored their lives, categorised them as so many statistics, planned to move them about as so many plastic pins on a demographic map, is in the photograph. It is there as an emblem of the Defiance Campaign, in which Huddleston had currently engaged that attention of his, and which the whites in power crushed while their supporters turned their heads away. It is there as an omen of what was to come: Sharpeville, at the start of a new decade; the 1976 uprising; the school, rent and shop boycotts, the troops in the black townships, the detention of thousands without respect for childhood or old age, the strikes in factories and mines – and the deaths, the deaths, the unrolling death-scroll of constantly intensified state violence that, in the 1980s, inevitably brought forth counter-violence from its victims. Within the chiaroscuro of that photograph the black people of South Africa are wholly present in the attention of a white man who, from the beginning of his experience in our country, saw them not as statistics and movable counters in some ugly and insane plan to keep races apart and class domination in power, but as blood, heart, brain and spirit, as human beings dispossessed of their birthright and certain to regain it.

  That is what is in the instant of a night in Newclare in 1952. I have no religious faith, but when I look at that photograph of a profoundly religious man, I see godliness in a way I can understand deeply, I see a man in whom prayer functions, in Simone Weil’s definition,1 as a special form of intelligent concentration. Everything that is in that photograph is what whites in South Africa have turned away from, towards deliberate fragmentation, callous and stupid denial, wild political distraction, mindless elevation of indifference; turned away to catastrophe.

  Yet Trevor Huddleston’s concentration remains. It asserts, always, that another way of thinking and living existed, and still exists. What is asserted there was passed on by Huddleston to many people and has never been forgotten or abandoned by them, but handed down to another generation. He belongs to the living history of the liberation movement in an ancestry all of us, black and white, who are involved in the movement now are inspired to claim. He is the only white man to have received the Isitwalandwe – the highest distinction in African society; that award was conferred upon him in a particular context at the Congress of the People in 1955, but I know of no one in any of the liberation organisations who, whatever their political ideology, does not revere him. Certainly, all whites in the struggle are under his sign.

  Everyone in the contemporary world is familiar with the old pious condemnation of churchmen who ‘meddle in politics’. In South Africa, it was invoked against the Reverend Michael Scott before Huddleston, and after Huddleston against Bishop Ambrose Reeves and others, as it is now against the Reverend Allan Boesak and (and how!) Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There is a more subtle and sophisticated form of attack – derogation. Its vocabulary, too, is worn smooth: ‘sentimental liberalism’, ‘starry-eyed Utopianism’. ‘Priests and pinkos’ don’t understand that politics is the ‘art of the possible’. The inference is always that churchmen who accept political action as part of their responsibility for humankind are well meaning but unfitted for the task. In short, they lack the necessary specific intelligence.

  Trevor Huddleston’s place in South African history demonstrates exactly the reverse. In him, early on, it was clear that ‘intelligence’ in all its senses has combined to produce exactly what would have been the specific intelligence necessary to find a peaceful political end to racism in all its avatars, economic, social, religious. Intelligence means superior understanding and quickness of apprehension; inherent mental qualities. It also means what may be acquired: to have intelligence of something is to have news and knowledge of it. Then there is the dimension of Simone Weil’s definition: the faculty of ‘intelligent concentration’ that is prayer. Trevor Huddleston summoned all three into synthesis. (How evident this is in his book, Naught for your Comfort.) His actions showed a superior understanding of the political future of South Africa far in advance not only of parliament but also of most liberal thinkers among people who had the vote – the white minority. Those actions were based on the first-hand knowledge, ‘intelligence’, gained working among the majority – the black South Africans whose lives were to be the decisive factor in South African politics. Through the focus of his Weilian faculty, he saw us all clearly, as few of us saw ourselves.

  Some of the non-violent forms of resistance that have been seen to bring results, since, stem from his kind of specific intelligence. He saw before anyone else that a sports boycott would rudely waken the average ‘non-political’ white voter from the sleep of complacent tacit racism. His initiative has resulted in the most successful and long-lived anti-apartheid campaign ever sustained. His political action, supporting the ANC, encouraging the people of his parish in Sophiatown to resist one of the first population removals, was evidence of a prescient understanding and political forecast of what was to come: the vast and terrible shifting of whole populations, let alone townships, about the country, the isolation of people in ethnic backwaters dubbed ‘states’, the destruction of community life, and, finally, the stripping of black South Africans of their citizenship.

  He was a good politician, that churchman. If our professional politicians had had his intelligence they would not have behind them today the failed Verwoerdian ‘grand apartheid’; with them, the doomed Outhouses of Parliament for so-called coloureds and Indians only; and ahead an immediate future that, because of ‘reforms’ whose scenario is still projected in black and white, and whose script still keeps ultimate power in white hands only, promises only violence. Their tragic lack of intelligence – not being able to grasp the fact of the social forces of their own post-colonial era, not being open to the information that the majority was plainly giving them, not having any political morality other than that based on physical attributes of skin and hair – has brought this tragedy about.

  I didn’t know Trevor Huddleston well, personally. I met him in the early 1950s through our mutual friend Anthony Sampson, and, set beside my great admiration for the public figure, there is an endearing trivial memory. Some years later a party for Anthony Sampson was held in my house. While my husband Reinhold Cassirer and I were still preparing food and drink, the first guest arrived. It was Huddleston, and he and Anthony settled on the verandah. Our son, taking on hostly duties for the first time, kept offering a plate of stuffed eggs, and to his dismay the guest never refused, but kept absently reaching out and eating them. The small boy came rushing indignantly into the kitchen: ‘Mum, the man in a skirt is finishing all the eggs!’

  An uncharacteristic side-glance at that figure striding so ascetically through our lives in Johannesburg in the 1950s, less at home in white suburbia than in the Sophiatown of crowded yards, shebeens, vigorous street life, the blare of pata-pata music, and the roof-raising voices of the congregation singing in the people’s lovely home on the hill, his Church of Christ the King. But wherever I encountered him, here or there, ‘the man in a skirt’ was an assurance that South Africa didn’t have to be as it was, that the barriers set up between black and white must come down in situations other and greater than private affinities and friendships – those relationships which many of us in the 1950s enjoyed but which lacked the necessary political energy and dedication to bring freedom.

  He left us, left South Africa physically. It was not of his own volition. But he hasn’t gone, any more than Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada and their fellow prisoners are not with us. He acted here, and has continued to act in exile, to achieve
a different South Africa, which he knew was and knows is possible, and will be.

  1988

  The Gap Between the Writer and the Reader

  When I am asked that interviewer’s stock in trade, ‘For whom do you write?’ I reply irritably, ‘For anyone who reads me.’ The question is crass, giving away the press’s assumption that a writer presumes ‘audience potential’. It seems typical of one of the anti-art tenets of commercialism: give the public what they know. But writers – artists of all kinds – exist to break up the paving of habit and breach the railings that confine sensibility: free imaginative response to spring up like grass. We are convinced that we are able to release the vital commonality of the human psyche, our reach limited only by the measure of our talent. After all, isn’t this what we ourselves have received at the touch of other writers?

  If we are not manufacturing for Mills and Boon, if we are not writing political tracts disguised as works of the imagination, we do not have in mind a shadow company of heads out there, the chat-show groupies, or the Party supporters. But for some time now, I have felt a certain unease when I snap, ‘Anyone who reads me’. The echo comes: ‘Oh really? My, my!’

  I begin to think there is a question to be asked, but it is not ‘For whom do we write?’ It is ‘For whom can we write?’ Is there not such a thing as writer potential, perhaps? The postulate reversed? And may I dismiss that one highhandedly?

  These doubts – or more accurately suggestions – have come about in my particular case less from readings in literary theory over the years than as a result of experience out there in the world among, not ordinary people – to a writer no one is ordinary – among non-literary people. Which does not imply that they do not read, only that their reading does not take place within the culture most literature presupposes.

  And here there must be a self-correction again. The suggestions are raised as much by the contradictions between literary theory – which, of course, is concerned with the reader’s perceptions as well as the writer’s conscious and subconscious intentions – and the actual experience of the man or woman on the receiving end of all these deliberations: the generic reader.

  For the generic reader surely must be the one I have in mind when I answer that I write for ‘anyone who reads me’. More than twenty years ago, we were all entranced by or sceptical of (or both at once) the discoveries of structuralism and its analysis of our art and our relationship to the reader. The Freudian explanations that interested some of us seemed simplistic and speculative by comparison. The subconscious was ectoplasm in contrast with the precise methodology of a work such as, say, Roland Barthes’s S/Z, which had been published in 1970 on the basis of work done in the sixties, and in which the whole emphasis of literature passed from writer to reader. Barthes’s goal was ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text’, of ‘what can be read but not written’. The novel, the short story, the poem, were redefined as a ‘galaxy of signifiers’.44 As Richard Howard sums it up, Barthes’s conviction of reading was that ‘what is told is always the telling’.45 And Harry Levin wrote,

  To survey his [the writer’s] writings in their totality and chart the contours of their ‘inner landscape’ is the critical aim of current Structuralists and Phenomenologists. All of these approaches recognise, as a general principle, that every writer has his own distinctive configuration of ideas and sentiments, capacities and devices.46

  Barthes’s brilliance, with its element of divine playfulness, made and makes enthralling reading – for those of us who share at least sufficient of his cultural background to gain aesthetic pleasure and revelation from his cited ‘signifiers’. It’s a detective game, in which the satisfaction comes from correctly interpreting the clue – elementary, for Sherlock Holmes, but not for my dear Watson. Barthes, in the structural analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, is the Sherlock Holmes who, deducing from his immensely rich cultural experience, instantly recognises the fingerprints of one cultural reference upon another. The reader is Watson, for whom, it may be, the ‘signifier’ signifies nothing but itself, if there is nothing in the range of his cultural experience for it to be referred to. It is a swatch of cloth that does not match any colour in his spectrum, a note that cannot be orchestrated in his ear. So that even if he is told that Balzac’s clock of the Elysée Bourbon is actually chiming a metonymic reference to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Paris of the Bourbon restoration, and then to the restoration as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’47 – there remains a blank where that reader is supposed to be reading ‘what is not written’. The signifier works within a closed system: it presupposes a cultural context shared by writer and reader beyond mere literacy. Without that resource the reader cannot ‘read’ the text in Barthesian abundance.

  ‘Words are symbols that assume a shared memory’, says Borges.48 Without that memory the Faubourg Saint-Honoré is just the name of a district, it has no elegant social or intellectual associations, either as an image conjured up from visits to Paris or as a symbol described in other books, visualised in paintings. The Bourbon restoration brings no association as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’ because the reader doesn’t know the place of the Bourbon restoration in French political and social history. The polymath interchange of the arts, letters, politics, history, philosophy, taken for granted by Barthes, is not the traffic of that reader’s existence.

  When one says one writes for ‘anyone who reads me’ one must be aware that ‘anyone’ excludes a vast number of readers who cannot ‘read’ you or me because of concerns they do not share with us in grossly unequal societies. The Baudelairean correspondences of earlier literary theory cannot work for them, either, because ‘correspondence’ implies the recognition of one thing in terms of another, which can occur only within the same cultural resource system. This is the case even for those of us, like me, who believe that books are not made out of other books, but out of life.

  Whether we like it or not, we can be ‘read’ only by readers who share terms of reference formed in us by our education – not merely academic but in the broadest sense of life experience: our political, economic, social and emotional concepts, and our values derived from these: our cultural background. It remains true even of those who have put great distances between themselves and the inducted values of childhood: who have changed countries, convictions, ways of life, languages. Citizenship of the world is merely another acculturation, with its set of givens which may derive from many cultures yet in combination becomes something that is not any of them.

  ‘In our time, the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms’ – so said Thomas Mann, and I quoted this as an epigraph for one of my early novels. I saw the proposition then as the destiny of my characters: now I can see that it could be applied to the destiny of literature. For if politics interprets destiny, it must be accepted that the destiny of culture cannot be separated from politics. Posing to himself the big question, ‘For whom do we write?’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘Given the division of the world into a capitalist camp, an imperialist camp and a revolutionary camp, whom is the writer writing for?’49

  While – if he has any sense – refusing to write for any camp, despite his personal political loyalties (and I think there are more of these than Calvino allows), the writer certainly writes from within one of them. And the reader reads from within one. If it is not the same as that of the writer, he is presumed at least to ‘read’ in the writer’s signifiers some relevance to his own, different cultural background.

  But frequently the reader does not find equivalents, in that culture, for the writer’s referential range, because he has not ‘read’ that range. He cannot. The signifying image, word, flashes a message that cannot be received by a different set of preconceptions.

  This happens even at apparently homogeneous cultural levels. In reviews of your fiction and the interviews to which you are
subjected, this process can hatch in your text like a cuckoo’s egg. What comes out is unrecognisable, but the reader, reviewer, journalist, insists that it is yours.

  I experienced this when I came to the United States for the publication of a novel of mine entitled Burger’s Daughter. The daughter and other characters in the story were centred around the personality of Lionel Burger, exemplifying the phenomenon – and problem – of ideology as faith in the family of an Afrikaner who, through becoming a Communist, devotes his life and his children’s to the liberation of South Africa from apartheid.

  In reviews, Burger was unfailingly referred to as a liberal: I myself was guilty of an unthinkable lack of deference to a famous talk-show personality when I contradicted his description of Burger as a noble white liberal.

  ‘He’s not a liberal, he’s a Communist,’ I interrupted.

  But it was no good. None of these people ‘read’ me because in the ethos of mainstream American society a Communist could never, no matter in what country or social circumstances, be a good man. Yet it had to be acknowledged that Burger was a good man because he was a fighter against racism: therefore my signal must be that Burger was a liberal.