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

So the mobile phone, Kindle, and other devices become the paperbacks of the future — rivalling, anyway, the printed volume’s portability? And the beguilement (or shall we say the corruption) of the writer to ‘publish’ in this ephemeral way cannot be discounted. Apparently the money is good; better and quicker than royalties. The seduction of the image, away from the printed word, has extended, in one instance already, to the very process of writing becoming an image. An American actor-turned-writer has fitted a tiny special camera to his computer and written his science fiction novel watched by a webcam. The linkage of his study at home to the internet by this means will bring him $2 million as a deal with a software company promoter. The reader as voyeur.

Vast advances in IT communications are an information revolution that has great possibilities for social development if well used, which means made economically available to the millions in the world, the underdeveloped and developing world whose lives will otherwise be bulldozed by the financial oligarchy of globalisation. But in literature, technology cannot ever replace with the image the illumination that comes from the written word, self-contained, self-powered, in print on paper, infinitely accessible for rumination on and return to, between hard or soft covers.

First it was the book of the movie.

Now it is the book of the website.

This is the lion’s problem just as it is that of the rest of the world’s literature.

2006

Pieces in this collection first appeared in the following publications: A South African Childhood; Cannes Epilogue ( The New Yorker ); Hassan in America ( The Forum ); Egypt Revisited ( National English Review ); Chief Luthuli; New Notes from the Underground ( Atlantic Monthly ); Apartheid; The Congo; Party of One ( Holiday ); A Bolter and the Invincible Summer; Taking into Account; Pula! ( London Magazine ); Censored, Banned, Gagged ( Encounter ); Great Problems in the Street; Madagascar ( The Essential Gesture by Nadine Gordimer, ed. Stephen Clingman); Notes of an Expropriator; The Prison-House of Colonialism ( Times Literary Supplement ); One Man Living Through It ( Magazine of the World Press ); Why Did Bram Fischer Choose Jail?; Letter from Johannesburg; The Short Story in South Africa ( Kenyon Review ); Merci Dieu, It Changes ( Atlantic Travel African Development ); Pack Up, Black Man; Unchaining Poets; Censorship — The Final Solution; Five Years into Freedom: My New South African Identity; Africa’s Plague, and Everyone’s; Lust and Death ( New York Times ); The New Black Poets ( Dalhousie Review ); A Writer’s Freedom; The South African Censor: No Change; Censorship and its Aftermath ( Index on Censorship ); English-Language Literature and Politics in South Africa ( Journal of Southern African Studies ); Letter from Soweto; Letter from the 153rd State; Mysterious Incest; The Child Is the Man; Living in the Interregnum; The Idea of Gardening; The Gap Between the Writer and the Reader; Joseph Roth ( New York Review of Books ); What Being a South African Means to Me ( South African Outlook ); Transkei: A Vision of Two Blood-Red Suns ( GEO ); Unconfessed History ( New Republic ); The Essential Gesture ( The Age Monthly Review ); Huddleston ( Trevor Huddleston: Essays on His Life and Work , ed. Deborah Duncan Honor); The African Pot ( Die Zeit ); A Writer’s Vital Gift to a Free Society; Atlantis ( Guardian ); Freedom Struggles out of the Chrysalis; Remembering Barney Simon ( Independent ); Sorting the Images from the Man ( Newsweek ); Turning the Page ( Transition ); Beyond Myth; Rising to the Ballot; The Dwelling Place of Words ( Washington Post ); Personal Proust ( Salmagundi ); What News on the Rialto? ( Los Angeles Times ); Edward Said ( Sunday Independent (Johannesburg)); Susan Sontag ( Sunday Times (South Africa)); Desmond Tutu As I Know Him ( Tutu As I Know Him , eds Lavinia Crawford-Browne and Piet Meiring); Experiencing Two Absolutes ( The Star (South Africa)). The following pieces were first published as introductions to editions of the works discussed: Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart ; Joseph Conrad and Almayer’s Folly ; With Them You Never Know; William Plomer and Turbott Wolfe ; ‘To You I Can’; Leo Tolstoy and The Death of Ivan Ilyich ; Naguib Mahfouz’s Three Novels of Ancient Egypt . The following pieces were first delivered as addresses or lectures: Relevance and Commitment; Letter from South Africa; Our Century; The Status of the Writer in the World Today; The Poor Are Always with Us; Octavio Paz; When Art Meets Politics; A Letter to Future Generations; Hemingway’s Expatriates; The Entitlement Approach; Living with A Writer; Home Truths from the Past; Witness: The Inward Testimony; Faith, Reason and War; The Lion in Literature.

Censored, Banned, Gagged

1 My latest novel, Occasion for Loving (London: Gollancz; New York: Viking, 1963), was held under embargo for a while, but has now been released; its fate, once it is published in a cheaper edition, probably will be the same as that of the earlier novel. [In fact Occasion for Loving was not ultimately banned; possibly because, amongst other things, it dealt with the failure of an inter-racial love affair.]

2 Some of the younger Afrikaans writers are beginning to feel stifled by a literary tradition that ignores the glaring realities of our country’s life. If they are moved to write books that do not conform to the tradition of Afrikaans writing, who is to publish them? Afrikaans is not spoken outside South Africa, the European Protectorates, and the Rhodesias.

3 An imprecise definition in South Africa, at the best of times. Randolph Vigne and Peter Hjul are members of the Liberal Party who were running a liberal fortnightly, as was its founder, Patrick Duncan, at the time he was put under ban — subsequently he went into exile in Basutoland, left the Liberal Party and aligned himself with the anti-Communist, militantly black nationalist Pan-Africanist Congress.

A Writer’s Freedom

4 The Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach returned to South Africa under a false name in August 1975 after years of self-imposed exile in Paris. Arrested shortly after his arrival he was sentenced on 26 November to nine years’ imprisonment, having pleaded guilty to twenty-two charges under the Terrorism and Suppression of Communism Acts.

5 Chatsworth and Soweto are respectively Indian and African ghettos. Dimbaza is the notorious ‘resettlement area’ for Africans which is the subject of the film Last Grave at Dimbaza .

Letter from Soweto

6 The South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg released on 8 November the following analysis gleaned from cases reported in the national press between 16 June and 31 October: 1,200 people have already stood trial. Three thousand are facing trials not yet completed. Of the 926 juveniles tried and convicted, 528 have been given corporal punishment, 397 have received suspended sentences or fines, and one has been jailed.

Transkei

7 Where I have used ‘Transkei’ — the term for the so-called ‘independent homeland’ — instead of ‘the Transkei’ — denoting the region — it does not imply any recognition on my part of this integral area of South Africa as a separate country.

Relevance and Commitment