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

One looks for some sort of wisdom in how others have contemplated fear. There’s the gung-ho of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural address back in 1933. Was it Hitler’s rise to power, so distantly European, he had in mind when he pronounced ‘Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ Sounds hollow now, after new forms of human extermination we’ve discovered for ourselves since then.

Can fear be a force for the good?

Remember the old adage ‘Best safety lies in fear’. But that, it will be morally countered, condones cowardice; shrinking from the duty to defend at risk the values your society holds. Thucydides was the first philosopher I educated myself with as an adolescent; it’s natural that I go back to him now and find in an old notebook another take on the phenomenon of fear. ‘That war is an evil is something that we all know, and it would be pointless to go on cataloguing all the disadvantages involved in it. No one is forced into war by ignorance, nor, if he thinks he will gain from it, is kept out by fear .’ (My italics.) The mass protests against the United States war on Iraq are made on the conviction that the gain, by war, of control of the world’s second greatest oil fields is not ‘kept out’ by fear that thousands of the people categorised as ‘enemy led’ will be killed and body bags of the righteous young victors will never require fuel oil again.

‘Fear has many eyes and can see underground’ observes Cervantes. Didn’t the fear of what is happening — the roar is in our ears — begin within us when 11 September 2001 buried the invincible? If time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate, doesn’t T. S. Eliot wander ahead over Ground Zero when he writes, way back in 1922, ‘And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’

I am one of those who live far from the terrible threat of strike and retaliation across oceans and skies. But I am not in that now non-existent enclave of isolation, out-of-this-world. And like many who are distant from the continents of battle, I have nevertheless a personal stake in this war: someone closest to me lives with his young family in the vulnerable heart of New York. He tells me that the children’s school has notified parents that the school basement has been equipped as a shelter, with water supplies and an adapted ventilation system that will keep out noxious elements. Some people, he says, have packed up and left the city, the obvious target of violence, direct or insidious. Is this ceding ground to those who threaten? Or is it a sensible option for people who have the means to absent themselves from their wage-earning posts and have some place to go: somewhere safe. Safe: who can tell what and where is beyond striking distance of the unconventional weapons we are told come from laboratories, not armouries?

I ask: What are you going to do?

So he reminds me: What did you and your kind do during the crises of apartheid, when there was danger of being arrested by the political police, or having some right-wing fanatic put a bomb to blow you up in your car?

Go carry on with your life.

Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul.

2003

There seems to be some confusion, here: I am the writer. So I can only conclude that I shall be relating what it is like to be living with myself. Not that there isn’t a situation cited: everyone is faced with the basic problem of the self. A secret intimacy which, it is said, influences all others. First Know Thyself. Perhaps the most difficult relationship of all?

I’ve had to live with myself through a long life as a writer and as a woman. It wouldn’t have been much different existentially had that life been between the writer and a man. Whatever the gender, we writers have to make, no matter how, clear distinction between what life-space is reserved for the writer and what must be that of the — what shall I term it? — socio-biological life. Sounds grandiose, that term, but I can’t settle for ‘emotional life’ because there are strong emotions involved in the product of the writing life.

The apportionment of time and attention means self-discipline of a very strict kind. A journalist has a deadline to meet. The poet, novelist is her/his own boss. The publisher may specify, in a contract, when the manuscript shall be delivered, but this is on the writer’s estimate, as task-master, of when it shall be fulfilled by the workings of an imagination which keeps no clock or calendar. If the advance payment runs out before the work is achieved, that’s the nature of the gap between creativity and commerce.

It goes without saying that no writer waits for what people who are not writers call inspiration. Not that it doesn’t come; but usually not in the hours set down for the writing table, the typewriter, word processor (or whatever the tool may be). Those hours are for the transformation of something already occurred, themes that take hold, beneath some other activity or situation. Waking up in the middle of the night. Ceasing to hear what the babble in a bar or a meeting is about. A displacement to a level of another irresistible, intense concentration elsewhere. I think I began to write, relating narratives, conversations, impressions silently to myself as a child sitting in the back of my parents’ car on drives long or short. Now I often have this same sort of experience on long-distance flights; between a here and a there , the demands of exchange with other people, I’m living with myself: the self of the individual imagination. (The collective imagination is what you and I enter through literature, theatre, films.)

I believe writers, artists in general, have something of the monster in their personality. If selfishness is monstrous. Like most writers — I’ll guarantee — I’ve had to accept in myself that I would have to without compunction put the demands of my writing generally before human obligations — except, perhaps, while falling in love. On the principle that every businessman or woman executive is protected from random visitors and telephone calls by a guard of receptionist and secretary, I long ago made it clear to everyone, even those closest and dearest to me, that during my working hours no one must walk in on me, expect to reach me. Since the house where I live with others is also my workplace, I’ve made as an exception only an interruption to tell me the house is on fire. When my children were too young for boarding school my writing hours were those when they were absent at day school, and during the holidays the monster-writer decreed that they keep out of sight and sound during those same hours. But I got what I no doubt deserved one day when my small son transgressed, playing outside near my window, and I heard him reply to a friend’s question ‘What’s your mother’s job?’ — ‘She’s a typist.’ His response to living with a writer.

I’ve found myself to be a secretive person to live with. I don’t know if this is general, for writers. I have been unable to share with anyone the exigencies, the euphoria at having arrived at what I wanted in my work or the frustration at finding it lacking. I cannot understand how the great Thomas Mann could bring himself to read the day’s stint of writing aloud to his assembled family each evening. I’ve always been convinced no one could reach what I really was saying in a piece of writing until I had satisfied myself finally that it was the best I could possibly do with it.