Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘The author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them.’102 (My italics.) Toni Morrison again: I take it she means the author has chosen to create these creatures rather than others, or his life experience has chosen him to make those choices. In each writer, the achievement is how far his/her imaginative discoveries of the mysteries of our existence has gone. This is how I see Hemingway’s creation of the expatriate persona in all its complexity, as part not only of the essential literature of but also a model produced by the twentieth century, the violent and bloody assembly line of our time during which we have invented so much, learned so much without learning how to live together and find that place in ourselves which would make this possible. On Ernest Hemingway’s centennial too much will be speculated about him, too much spoken about him, too much written about him, including my own part in this. When we go home, let us leave his life alone, it belongs to him, as he lived it. Let us read his books.

  1999

  The 2000s

  Personal Proust

  There are two ways in which great literature impacts upon society. The one is cultural, in narrow definition of culture as practice of the arts: the writer breaks the traditional seals of the Word, takes off into exploration of new modes of expression, challenges and changes what fiction is. After Proust, after Joyce, yes, the novel could never be the same.

  The other impact of great literature is its power of changing the consciousness of the reader – even if that lay reader were to have no awareness of how it has been done, the literary techniques and devices the writer has taken up, reinvented or invented. As a fiction writer I have been alertly privy to and no doubt learned from the literary innovations of Marcel Proust. But a writer finds her/his own voice or is not a writer. What has remained with me for a lifetime is the influence of Proust’s emotional and aesthetic perceptions. So what I want to talk about is this other impact. The Proust who influences the persona. The Proust after reading whom the reader can never be the same.

  This is a grave matter; wonderful. Perhaps dangerous. For there are those among us whose epiphany comes not from the faiths of religion, philosophy or politics, but the illumination of the subterranean passages of life by the imaginative writer.

  I was at quite an advanced age – late teens – for one who had lived in books since early childhood, when long after Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, I came upon that mistitled Remembrance of Things Past in the Modern Library edition of the Scott Moncrieff translation. I had survived a lonely mother-love-dominated childhood and so my first response was one of recognition; here was a writer who understood that childhood better than I did myself: an identification. But later as I read and returned to that book its effect was something different, exegetical, prophetic to the series of presents, existential stages I was coming to, passing through.

  Holed up in an armchair in the tin-roofed house of a mining town in the South African veld, far, far in every way from the Méséglise Way, Swann’s Way, Combray, Balbec and the Boulevard Haussmann, I discovered that the intense response I had to natural beauty, to flowers, trees, and the sea visited once a year, was not something high-mindedly removed from the drives of existence I was struggling with, but part of a sensuality which informs, belongs with awakening sexuality, the conflation of emotional and aesthetic formation. Every time, any time, one turns back to The Novel one finds the delight of something relevant to a past perception that one had missed before … For example, in my recent re-reading of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (my third in French) I have seen how pollen recurs, the natural product become a metaphor – the wind-distributed fecundity part of the very air we breathe – first coming from the regard of the girl the narrator follows with his eyes on the drive with Madame de Villeparisis in A L’ Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs. And then there’s the bumblebee that enters the courtyard with pollen that signifies the attraction cast in the air between noble Baron de Charlus and the lowly waistcoat-maker, Jupien. Proust himself pollinates ineffable connections between needs and emotions aroused by various means, in us.

  In the context of projected existence, I came to Proust from D. H. Lawrence and Blake; sexuality was fulfilment guaranteed to the bold, anyone who would flout interdictions and free desire: ‘Abstinence sows sand all over/The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,/ But Desire Gratified/Plants fruits of life and beauty there.’103 And this gratification between men and women was the image of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on simulated clouds – like Italo Calvino, I had formed my notion of future emotional life as innocently, lyingly portrayed by movies of the time. The processes of loving, as exemplified in the desperate pilgrimage of Swann – what a Way that is, ecstatic, frustrating, impossible to turn away from, viewing the pursued beloved from the terrible angles of suspicion, losing the will to continue, grabbed by the will to go on; always, moving along with him, one has moments when one wants to shake him: stop! And sees he cannot, will not. Maybe that’s the principle of love … And in the end, that devastating conclusion: this woman, for whom he has spoiled years of his life, was really not his type at all.

  Proust reformed, informed my youthful understanding of the expectations of sexual love, showed me its immense complexity, its ultimate dependency on the impossibility of knowing the loved one – the very defeat of possession – and the concomitant process of self-knowledge, often dismaying.

  The cloud-mating of Fred and Ginger dispersed for ever. In the life of the emotions I was embarked upon my expectations were tutored by the greatest exploration ever made of the divine mystery of the sexual life in its ambient world of sensuality. No time to discuss the continuation of the theme with Albertine; only to observe that not only does it not matter a damn if an Albertine was really an Albert transformed by the alchemy of imagination rather than a sex-change operation – himself a homosexual, no one has written better than Marcel Proust of heterosexual relations. Perhaps literary genius can be defined yet once again: as a creativity that is all things, knows everything, in every human.

  After early readings of The Book I read, of course, Les Plaisirs et Les Jours, Jean Santeuil, Contre Sainte-Beuve, but to these I have not returned. Like all of us, I have more or less the gamut of Proust scholarship in English and French. But all have been surpassed, for me, by the publication this year of Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way, an amazing feat of originality where one would have thought that all the gold-bearing ore had long been brought to the surface. My present reading of The Book has become a new one, filled with new understanding, possibilities, and new joys, through the variety of lenses provided by Roger Shattuck’s radiant vision.

  Marcel Proust is a writer with whom one moves along, for life; reading and re-reading without ever exhausting the sources he reveals only when one is ready for, or made ready for them. At the grand and poignant final social-gathering-of-all-social-gatherings narrator/Marcel finds past friends and acquaintances unrecognisably changed by age, while still having the sense of himself as he had been back in his mother’s eyes. He replies to a young woman’s invitation to dine: ‘With pleasure, if you don’t mind dining alone with a young man’ and only when he hears people giggle, adds hastily ‘or rather an old one’. Later he realises that the span of time represented by the aspect of the gathering not only had been lived through but was his life, presented to him.

  As I grow old I find myself ready for the revelation, Time Regained, of this Proustian source when, among old friends with whom I was always the youngest of the circle, I realise we are, now, all alike, disguised in the garb of ageing. I, like everyone else, have to be introduced – to myself. Proust makes it another epiphany.

  2000

  Africa’s Plague, and Everyone’s

  Sixty-nine per cent of the world’s victims of HIV and Aids are in sub-Saharan Africa. This figure is not easy to take in. Aids seems to have come upon everyone while we were looking the other way: it happened to some sex or colour other than our own
; it was endemic to some other country.

  In South Africa it was quite some time before the realisation that the disease was not the unfortunate problem of our poorer neighbouring countries, but was our own. Now, out of South Africa’s 43 million people, about 4 million have been infected by HIV and a further 1,700 are infected daily. Recently, in a Johannesburg home caring for orphaned or abandoned babies born with Aids, there was a service in memory of forty who had died there not long before. While South Africa is the most highly developed country on the African continent, we are faced with this kind of future for the generations to come.

  But every community, every affected country, has to decide how to approach what is no longer a problem but a catastrophe. There is prevention, and there is cure. The ideal is to seek both at once, but this is beyond the capacity of most countries where the disease is rampant. Cure, and prevention by inoculation, are not within the capacity of lay people; these are in the hands of medical science, which implies money to be provided to advance research. Immediate prevention is in the hands and initiative of each population itself. I believe we cannot emphasise bluntly enough that the cure and vaccine development depend on money. And until recently, the country that has the money, the United States, perhaps inevitably has concentrated on a vaccine for a subtype of Aids prevalent in the Northern Hemisphere. It was only at the World Economic Forum’s meeting this year that President Clinton announced that large-scale aid for vaccine development would be forthcoming from the United States. Only now has the International Aids Vaccine Initiative announced a third international development project, based on those subtypes of the virus most prevalent in the direly affected regions of Southern and East Africa, the subtypes C and A. It is encouraging that the project is being pursued in wide collaboration among researchers of the United States, South Africa, Kenya and Oxford University, and that the philosophy of the initiative is that of ‘social venture capital’, meaning that in return for financing, it has secured rights to ensure that a successful vaccine, when it is achieved, will be distributed in developing countries ‘at a reasonable price’. The formation of an International Partnership Against HIV/Aids in Africa is to be welcomed as extremely important in the same context.

  The question of money – price – is vital in terms of the palliatives available to arrest the disease and alleviate symptoms. It is another piercing example of the gulf between the world’s rich and the world’s poor that the suffering from Aids may be alleviated, and even the lives prolonged, of those victims who can afford expensive treatment. The same principle applies to prevention. Everywhere in Africa moral and humanitarian decisions are a common dilemma, with money the deciding factor.

  At the level of international – global – responsibility, the total sum needed annually for Aids prevention in Africa is in the order of $2.3 billion. Africa currently receives only $165 million a year in official assistance from the world community.

  Other questions that rest with the world community become relevant: debt relief for developing countries, for example. The Director-General of the World Health Organization said last year that debt relief should be reviewed in light of the resources that governments with large debts need to confront HIV. The role of governments in financing is another example. Where does the defence budget not far exceed the public health budget to combat Aids? Nevertheless, what HIV and Aids mean to the capability to govern, ultimately, was revealed in South Africa by the Minister of Public Service and Administration in February. The public service is the largest employer in the country and the fundamental government structure. In 1999, one in eight South Africans was HIV-positive. It is estimated that 270,000 out of 1.1 million public servants could be infected by 2004. This looming crisis in governance exists almost everywhere on the African continent. If, in developing countries, defence budgets continue to leave HIV budgets relegated to a footnote, all we shall have left to defend in the end is a graveyard.

  Aids is not only a health catastrophe, a challenge to medical science. It is socially enmeshed in the conditions of life that obtain while it spreads, just as the medieval plague was in its time. Although Aids is no respecter of class or caste, slum conditions, ignorance and superstition (it is a white man’s disease; it is a black man’s disease) make the poor its greatest source of victims. In working to prevent the spread of the virus, we must accept the idea that promiscuity is difficult to condemn when sex is the cheapest or only available satisfaction for people society leaves to live on the street. On another socio-economic level, casual sex thrives among young people who are materially privileged yet whom society has failed to endow with the real values of human sexuality, the knowledge that fulfilment involves contact with the other’s personality, that the sexual act is not some mere bodily function like evacuation – which is what some campaigners seem to reduce it to. There are subtleties, important ones, connected with any campaign against HIV and Aids, if it is to succeed in changing attitudes towards sexual mores. For there will be a cure discovered, there will be a vaccine – and after that? How shall we restore the quality of human relations that have been debased, shamed, reduced to the source of a fatal disease? The free condom dispenser is not the panacea. Neither, alone, is sex education restricted to anatomical diagrams and dire warnings in schools. The entire meaningfulness of personal sexual relations will need to be restored. That is what social health means, along with inoculation and survival. Self-interest cannot be discounted. So, to the developed world, a pragmatic word from the stricken African continent: call not to ask for whom the stock exchange bell tolls and the figures on the computer sound the alarm – the toll is for Europe, for the United States, even for those countries where HIV and Aids victims are few. For if the markets and vast potential markets for the developed world’s goods fail – if decimated populations mean there is no one left economically active with money to spend – that bell tolls for thee, globally.

  HIV/Aids is everyone’s disaster. It has, finally, something to do with our whole manner of existence. It confronts us with questions that must be answered historically: what have we done with the world, politically? What are we doing with the world? What do we mean by development? Some Ugandans who had been in the audience of an Aids information play were asked what message it had brought them. One said, ‘Don’t go out with bar girls.’ Another said, ‘Stick to one partner.’ Then an older woman said: ‘Aids has come to haunt a world that thought it was incomplete. Some wanted children, some wanted money, some wanted property, and all we ended up with is Aids.’

  Maybe she spoke for Africa.

  2000

  What News on the Rialto?

  The re-publication of a book by Natalia Ginzburg has brought back to me not only a work I found uniquely beautiful in its tranquil honesty when I read it in translation from the Italian in the sixties; it has opened an overgrown way, that I thought to be a cul-de-sac, in my own life.

  Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings – are what? Fictionalised family history? What was actually said; and what has been invented by Natalia that went on out of her hearing, in her Italian family from the thirties through the fifties: added exchanges between its members, imaginatively created by familiarity and the emotions, love, resentment, understanding, of which she was part?

  But she writes: ‘The places, events, people in this book are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented.’ Not for her the usual disclaimer, all characters are fictitious, no living personages, etc. ‘The names are all real … Possibly some may not be pleased to find themselves described in a book under their own names. To such I have nothing to say.’ And yet, again, from this translator of Proust (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, no less),1 the other, self-admonition: ‘I must not be beguiled into autobiography as such.’ Her blindfold trail into the past is not signposted by an uneven paving stone or the bite into a madeleine, but by over
hearing, echoing in her present, the intimate lingua franca of vanished family life.

  The past is crowded out by the present during the day. Early in the morning I lie in bed eavesdropping on the birds and the rubrics heard in childhood surface from that past.

  Natalia’s family sayings are concerned with family relationships increasingly affected by conflicting views on, and eventually actions of, fascists and anti-fascists – her family belonged to the latter. When I overhear in recollection my own family’s sayings, this is in the ambience of a different but related context: racism, first of the colonial kind, then that of its apogee, apartheid. But although Natalia Ginzburg married a foreigner, a Russian Jewish revolutionary, her own half-Jewish family was Italian, deeply rooted in their native country. There was no Old Country, not far behind them.