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

Tantalising for anyone living in the post-colonial world, it is for the reader to decide: was Turbott Wolfe a failure as a man of his time? Perhaps he was in Africa too soon? The day of the answer had not yet come.

William Plomer was nineteen years old when he began to write Turbott Wolfe . He was — yes — working in a trading store in Zululand, South Africa, in the 1920s. Only once is he identified as the author to whom Turbott Wolfe is telling his story. As Wolfe lies ‘… I know I am dying) in this cold and mothy bed’ he addresses by name ‘My good William Plomer’. A bit of an obvious ploy on the part of William Plomer to warn the reader not to assume (in fact the reader knows …) that Turbott Wolfe is William Plomer’s creation of an alternate self. As all characters a fiction writer creates are alternate selves: the people we might have been by the mysterious accident of birth.

William Plomer was born of English parents in South Africa in 1903 but always insisted that he could not claim himself as South African ‘since nobody, if a cat happened to have kittens in an oven, regards them as biscuits’. His childhood and education were divided back and forth between England, his ancestral home, and South Africa, where his father held various posts in colonial administration and did some farming. Nor very successfully; the trading store turned out to be the sole support of the Zululand farming venture.

Turbott Wolfe , written in pencil in school exercise books of the kind sold in a trading store, was sent to Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press in London. Knowing nothing of publishers and the unlikelihood of them wanting to take on outlandish works by unknown writers, young Plomer couldn’t have been more fortunate in his stab at finding a publisher. The Woolfs recognised the extraordinary originality of the novel, both in subject and style, in reference to what Edward Said, speaking of various literatures, terms ‘historical modes of being’. 124In this instance, the world-historical mode of colonial being, for both the coloniser and the colonised. It is an inexplicable lapse on the part of literary scholars and critics that Turbott Wolfe is not recognised as a pyrotechnic presence in the canon of renegade colonialist literature along with Conrad. While the work is only intermittently satire — and does not spare the narrator anti-hero, Turbott Wolfe himself, often attacked out of his own mouth, so to speak — it reveals William Plomer as that rarity, a writer brilliant enough to present deep, passionate seriousness with trenchant wit.

Turbott Wolfe was a success in England when published in 1926; disturbing, critically acclaimed. In New York a critic wrote, ‘Look elsewhere for your bedtime story.’ In South Africa the book drew down upon Plomer’s head such outrage that the twenty-two-year-old author could not have continued to find any kind of social acceptance there, and in the context of Double Lives (title of his later autobiography) — his life already a consciousness evolved between one continent, one culture, and another — he went to try yet another culture, Japan. He learned the language, worked as a literature teacher, formed some of the most important relationships of his adulthood and stayed for several years. From that period came his second novel, Sado .

But like Turbott Wolfe, he spent the rest of his life in England, where he wrote more fiction, autobiography and biography, and became one of the best poets of his generation, along with Auden, MacNiece, Spender, much quoted for his vivid humour and subtle critique of humbug of any kind.

William Plomer returned to South Africa once, briefly, in 1956, after thirty years away. We met at last the writer of the only novel of poetic vision to come out of our country since Olive Schreiner’s Story of An African Farm . A tall man, quietly and handsomely dressed, exquisitely courteous, receiving with a slight smile the gushing accusation: Mr Plomer, why have you written so few novels, why haven’t you gone on writing about Africa? But he had given the answer elsewhere, when he wrote ‘Literature has its battery hens; I was a wilder fowl.’

He died in 1973 and did not live to see the end of that epitome of the age of colonialism, apartheid, overcome in the victory of the South African black liberation movements. The native question as the answer. But he had heard and understood the answer, half a century before.

2003

If there was one thing I knew about Cuba, it was as a country emerged from the staggering burden of a colonial past and a dictatorship — Batista’s, as we emerged from apartheid’s white minority one — but Cuba now, uniquely, subjected for more than forty years to a USA blockade. If Castro’s regime, as long as Soviet Communist power existed, was a launching pad against the USA, militarily and ideologically, neither threat has any existence today. I am a signatory to the international protest demanding that the USA lift the blockade; and I’m aware that in the USA there is a considerable body of opinion that wants it abolished.

I am a member of the African National Congress in South Africa, but not of the South African Communist Party, one of its alliance partners. I didn’t go to Cuba prepared to celebrate uncritically what the Fidel Castro regime has achieved, nor rejoice in Western glee over its failures to provide important freedoms.

Cubans are poor, yes. Even the writers, academics and cultural administrators I spent time with are poor by the modest standards of people working in the arts in Europe, the USA and even my own country. In the crowds at the opening of the Havana International Jazz Festival, pelvis-to-buttock, breath-to-breath in standing room only, there was a calm equilibrium that could be sensed. A Cuban companion joked, ‘We aren’t jealous of the ones who found seats. We don’t own property. There’s no keeping up with the Joneses, you see. We don’t have any Joneses.’

Storming the bourgeoisie is the convention of revolution; taking over its ruin there is a reality. Creating a new and more just life may take longer than the forty-four years since the beginning of the Castro regime. This reality of taking over the grandiloquent ruins of colonio-capitalism in economic circumstances brought about by factors in the present is nakedly in your face as you drive along the sweep of the ancient fortressed harbour towards old Havana. Here are the empty hulks of a long façade of vast mansions that must have been merchants’ headquarters or sumptuous residences — but no, not empty. Where even three walls stand at one of the jagged, roofless levels people are bravely living. Glimpse of a table, bed.

Terrible living conditions, comparable to those in parts of Johannesburg where illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries in conflict, squat. In a shopping alley that runs off a grand square of exquisite seventeenth- to nineteenth-century buildings, I was among dignified people, wearing the T-shirts and jeans of our international uniform, buying pizzas from hole-in-the-wall vendors. The minimum wage in Cuba is twelve dollars a month. How does one subsist? Education and medical care are good and free, and here are shed-depots where everyone exchanges their ration tickets for basic foods at low prices payable in pesos. A wartime measure — but then the USA blockade is a wartime action against a country where no one is at war with anyone.

I was driven more than 350 kilometres from Havana to a resort of the Caribbean Paradise style dating from Batista’s time, available in dollars only. It was uncrowded, since tourists — unfortunately for the island’s economy — due to the USA’s ban on its citizens’ travel to Cuba, were confined to a Canadian party and several French people. USA ‘exemptions’ allowed 176,000 Americans to visit in 2001, and 25,000 came clandestinely; but I encountered very few anywhere.