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

There are so many threats to our continued existence; one hardly need name them. Some affect specific countries, regions defined by power groups. They are resolved or bring disaster to this or that part of the world. And if we can keep our patch of the planet clear of them, well, we turn away and hope to flourish through the next generation’s day. But one threat applies to us all. If we do not recognise our global life-dependency on water, we shall thirst, on a parched planet.

2003

Anybody who has any kind of public persona — pop star, sports hero, politician, artist, writer — knows the predictable questions a journalist will ask in an interview, according to whatever defining area of professional achievement the interviewee belongs. (We could reply in our sleep.) Such is fame or notoriety — pop stars and politicians the best copy. Writers — none of whose achievements have been or are famous on that scale, except perhaps Romeo and Juliet, Gone With The Wind and Harry Potter — are obliged, by their publishers, to be interviewed. I am one of them. (The authors of the Bible are a collective, agents of a Creativity said to be in heaven, therefore inaccessible.)

As years have gone by in a long writing life, I have musingly assembled in memory a short list of the questions journalists don’t ask. These sometimes would seem to me much more interesting — better copy? — than the ones they do. So I’ve decided to interview myself, and see what I can winkle out that they don’t think to. This implies I must also answer myself no matter how reluctant that self may be? Yes. Not I’ll be the judge, I’ll be the jury, but I’ll be the journalist, I’ll be victim. Some sample questions from me to me:

N.Q.

What is the most important lack in your life?

N.A.

I’ve lived that life in Africa without learning an African language. Even in my closest friendships, literary and political activities with black fellow South Africans, they speak only English with me. If they’re conversing together in one of their mother tongues (and all speak at least three or four of each other’s) I don’t understand more than a few words that have passed into our common South African use of English. So I’m deaf to an essential part of the South African culture to which I’m committed and belong.

N.Q.

What’s the most blatant lie you’ve ever told?

N.A.

Really can’t distinguish. Living through apartheid under Secret Police surveillance made those of us who opposed the regime actively, accomplished liars. You lied that you didn’t know the whereabouts of someone the police were looking to arrest, you lied about your encounters and movements; had to, in order to protect others and yourself.

N.Q.

You’ve achieved something as a writer, OK; but you have a daughter and a son, how do you rate as a mother?

N.A.

Ask them. If you don’t want to hear any other self-protective lies.

N.Q.

What was the best compliment you’ve ever been paid?

N.A.

When I was, years and years ago, on a camping trip on a farm, I was bitten by ticks that had brushed off the long grass I’d been walking through. When I complained of this, the old and very unattractive farmer said ‘If I was a tick, I’d also like to bite you.’

N.Q.

What is the most demeaning thing said about you as a writer?

N.A.

My eight-year-old son, when asked by a schoolfriend what his mother’s job was, said ‘She’s a typist.’ True, I was in my study typing some fiction or other at the time; I overheard, through my window, his judgement in the garden.

N.Q.

You were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at the hands of the King of Sweden. Do you look back on that as the best moment in your life?

N.A.

Best moment? Reinhold Cassirer and I had just married, and were at a party in London. He had gone to find a friend in an adjoining room. I found myself standing beside a woman I didn’t know, both of us amiably drinks in hand. He appeared in the doorway. She turned aside to me and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Who’s that divine man?’ I said: ‘My husband.’

N.Q.

How do you react to a bad review of one of your books?

N.A.

Ignore it if it’s by some hack, easily recognised by his/her poor understanding of what the book’s about. Pretend (to myself) to ignore it if it’s written by one whose judgement and critical ability I respect; and then take that judgement into account when, as my own sternest critic, I judge what I achieved or didn’t in that book.

N.Q.

How gratified are you to have your writing praised?

N.A.

Same answer as the one above: not at all, if I don’t respect the judgement of the one who praises, gratified when I believe the piece of work justifies such recognition coming from someone whose honesty, intellect and level of literary judgement I respect.

N.Q.

While writing, do you take drugs, smoke marijuana or drink alcohol to beef up your creative imagination?

N.A.

Only a double Scotch; hours after my writing day is over. (Wow! That quiz would be a tough one for many of my fellow writers, starting off with De Quincey.)

N.Q.

Do you think a writer should also know how to cook?

N.A.

Yes. The ivory tower has no kitchen. Work done there needs the earth of the ordinary tasks, distractions of everybody’s existence, although we writers complain like hell about this.

N.Q.

As a liberated woman, would you nevertheless prefer to have been born a man?

N.A.

Both sexes experience the joys of love-making. If she chooses, a woman has the additional extraordinary experience of growing a life inside herself, and presenting the world to it. It’s painful — all right. But the wider experience in life a writer has, the better the ability to identify with lives other than the writer’s own, and create varieties of character, states of being, other than his/her own. I sometimes think, for example, I’ve missed out on extending emotional experience by never having been sexually attracted to a woman. Anyway, a writer as such is a special kind of androgynous creature, all sexes and all ages when creating fictional characters, all the people he or she has known, observed or interacted with. So while I’m a woman, as a writer I’m a composite intelligence.

N.Q.

Why did you instruct your publisher to withdraw a novel of yours from the shortlist of the English ‘Orange Prize’ for women writers?

N.A.

I don’t think the sex of a writer is any criterion for literature. We are heterogeneous in our imagination, I believe. Writers black, female, gay, lesbian do the cause of recognition of their talents disservice in measuring their achievements particularly, exclusively, against themselves. Oh — you’ll note that, as far as I know, there is no category of prizes for males only, or whites, or for heterosexuals only.

N.Q.

You’re seventy-nine years old — when are you going to write your autobiography?

N.A.

Autobiography? Never. I am much too jealous of my privacy. Secretive, if you like. It’s all one has, in the end. Whereas anyone’s biographer has to make do with what’s somehow accessible, by hook or by crook.

N.Q.

Do you think people will still be reading books — printed on paper, bound — in the future?

N.A.

No. I think a hundred years or less from now, the image of words projected on screens of limitless kinds and flowing directly as sound into ears — even beyond what technological means exist at present — will have made the book like a stone tablet dug up by archaeologists. I’m shudderingly relieved to know I won’t be around to be so deprived.

Well: I can now draw my own conclusions about the character of the individual I was interviewing … It would be interesting to hear from other interviewee victims, what questions they — thankfully? — are never asked.