Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Her love of Dain is a betrayal of her father’s love; betrayal is increasingly to be a theme of Conrad’s deeply delved situations between political imperatives and personal lives, as well as in the relationships between men and women. (It is fascinating to foresee, here, its apogee to come in Under Western Eyes .)

Where lesser writers are content to have reached in relative fulfilment, one finality, Conrad, even in this first novel, is not, although the vision of old Almayer on his knees obliterating the footprints of his daughter in the sand where she has walked away with her chosen love to a boat is one that leaves its imprint on the mind long after the book is closed. Almayer burns the past; burns down the fine house known as Almayer’s Folly and dies, an opium smoker in the sole company of an old Chinaman. Shortly before his death he has said, to himself rather than to the rare visit of Captain Ford: ‘I cannot forget.’

The curse was pronounced upon himself, as well as on his daughter. It is compounded, symbolic in his abandoned loneliness, by the situation itself as the alienation of the coloniser. So, for Conrad, there is no finality in the way human lives might have gone , and he will spend the rest of his writing life in restlessly brilliant quest of their possibilities, the realised becoming the unrealised , to be followed in another and another working of the imagination on elusive reality. The constructions he evolved to do this began with his first novel, where he was then and thereafter to break the linear narrative. Almayer’s story is not told sequentially, it moves as our human consciousness does, where what happened in the past seamlessly interrupts the present, and what is to come occurs presciently between these. He makes demands on the reader to follow him in the cut-and-paste interplay of that consciousness: an invigorating pleasure only great writers can offer. A nineteenth-century writer who died early in the twentieth, Conrad’s work hurdled over modernism and practised post-modern freedom that was to enter literary theory long after his death.

Conrad’s writing is lifelong questioning: even the title of this book poses one. What was ‘Almayer’s Folly’? The pretentious house never lived in, his obsession with gold, his obsessive love for his daughter, whose cogenitors, the Malay woman’s race, he despised? All three? As if to answer some of these questions, Conrad did something else highly original, if doubtful in its success as an example of his work. A year after the publication of Almayer’s Folly in 1895, he produced — what shall I call it — a prologue-novel to it, An Outcast Of The Islands , in which Almayer and his then small daughter are also central characters. But I don’t advise reading Conrad in the way he obviously did not choose to be read; don’t start with An Outcast Of The Islands ; open the first pages of Conrad’s magnificent literary creation by taking up Almayer’s Folly .

2002

There comes a time in a reading life when you realise — there, on your bookshelves, are books you may never re-read. Books that once changed your sense of being. That opened your eyes, your understanding of human emotions, the context of your consciousness in the world.

Proposing the literature of the imagination as truth out of the reach of histories, I’ve often said ‘If you want to know about Napoleon’s famous retreat from Moscow, you have to read War and Peace , not a history book.’

Now facing me is the scuffed, monumental one-volume War and Peace . When did I last read it, and when shall I read it again — ever?

So now I have. And I understand that just as you discover new meaning in situations that recur in your life as changing social and political mores contain you, so every time you re-read a great work you discover something you missed because you and an earlier period were not ready for it: a hidden message for the particular present.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 and the novel was published in 1864. The time-span it covers is that of the Napoleonic wars in Russia from 1805 to 1812. It therefore chronicles events that happened before he was born. He was not writing about his own time, and I’m not reading about my own time. What the author and I have in common is that we are illuminating, each his own time, with intimations for the present that were there in the past. For him about 52 years distant; for me in 2003, 191 years.

The grandeur of the story moves from society salons around Tsar Alexander I, with the intrigues of love, its concomitant bargaining power in money and noble names, to the battlefields where none of these counts in snow, pain, hunger and death. The themes run concurrently, with fictional characters mixed with historical ones, invented gossip with actual military despatches. Tolstoy was a post-modernist nearly two centuries ago; his fiction brilliantly appropriated anything it demanded: life itself is incongruity.

Among the characters who emerge from the salons, Pierre Bezukhov is the most extraordinarily alive for me. He is rich, a count if only by a nobleman’s liaison with a mistress; educated abroad, he is of no particular career. He himself makes a misalliance, falling in love and marrying the femme fatale , Helen. The choice of the name a touch of Tolstoy’s wry humour. She is unfaithful, and there begins what was latent in Pierre’s character, the examined life as a search for existential meaning. He tries Freemasonry (in the 1960s he would have been barefoot chanting Hare Krishna in the street), he tries good works among slave-peasants, his disillusion with materialism foresees the discontents of the well-endowed swallowing Ecstasy in our millennium of great riches and greater poverty. For Pierre the war against Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was his saviour. First Napoleon’s prisoner of war, then ragged and hungry in the ruins of Moscow, he finds among his fellow wretches that the will to live is itself the joy in life.

But it is not the bold and subtle understanding of personal conflicts that makes this 139-year-old novel contemporary. It is its amazing prescience of the nature of endless violence, the confusion and hopelessness of its persistent use to solve human problems between peoples and nations, multiplying them down the centuries.

Tolstoy calls into question the cause of catastrophic events being attributed to a single symbolic individual. A Napoleon, Hitler — now, for us, a Bin Laden, a Saddam Hussein. ‘To the question as to what is the real causation of historical events … the course of this world depends on the coincidence of the wills of all those who are concerned in the issues …’ The world, in 1812, was what its peoples made it, not Napoleon or Alexander I, as ours is what we have made and are making of it. The hollowness of victories achieved by violence is there when Napoleon retreats from Moscow, and the Russian peasants come in from the country to loot from their own people; it is there when we see the same desperate moral breakdown in the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Kosovo, Burundi, every month somewhere new. On the day 80,000 men, Russians, Frenchmen, were killed at Borodino, ‘Napoleon neither fired a shot nor killed a man’. This is not the old fact that the leaders sit safe while they send Everyman out to kill or be killed. Tolstoy implies, beyond time and changing circumstances, the days of empires become our day of globalisation, that as individuals we bear responsibility for our world, which creates symbolic messianic politicians and leaders, taking us into chaos and foretelling our own corruption.

Re-reading Tolstoy’s book is to realise that we live, not as a brave new millennium so much as an epilogue to what is revealed in that book of the senseless, persistent suffering and demoralisation of violence as the inhuman condition.