Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

Anyway, the sword and the citation were packed away again, and the war came and there were more and more dispossessed and more and more committees. I was just old enough to get into the end of the war — I was in the Navy, but I never left my training-ship — and when I came back and went to Oxford and then joined my great-uncle, old Faunce (we have ridiculous names in our family; I was lucky to get away with Tobias), in the publishing firm, there was no shortage of injustices to champion, nor has there been, ever since. Of course, by then, I was old enough to take up my own stand in a house where it was considered sinful not to take a stand. I did often find that my interest in the sudden acceleration of the problems of human relationships now that man-ordained barriers of race, creed, class, and colour were breaking up, was as great as that of my mother and Faunce and their set. But I reserved to myself, even in that house, the right not to take a stand if I didn’t feel like it. Not to shame myself into indignance if I didn’t happen to give a damn. Was this just a rather childish defiance? Perhaps. But I assure you that there was something about Uncle Faunce, banging down his sherry glass beside the sheaf of letters and papers he had brought with him to Sunday lunch, and saying, ‘People don’t know the facts. We must start a newspaper campaign. Letters. Get Donald to do something for the Statesman. And what about Larry? I’ll call a public meeting myself. .’ that was inclined to cool the adrenalin of partisanship for any issue or person to stagnation in my blood by the time we had reached the stewed pears.

The atmosphere of ideological flux which I had breathed all my life sometimes seemed terrifyingly thin, a rare air in which one must gasp for the want of the oxygen of certainty, of an established way of life. Paradoxically, there had been bred into me a horror of the freedom that is freedom only to be free; I wanted to be free to cling to what I should break from, if I wished. I did not think that a man should have to lose himself, in Gide’s sense, in order to find himself. Something in me clung strongly to the need for mediating powers — tradition, religion, perhaps; a world where you might, if you wished, grow up to do what was expected of you. My mother and father gave up a great many small, unworthy things that together, constituted a workable framework of living, but what did they have to offer in their place? Freedom; an empty international plain where a wind turns over torn newspapers printed in languages you don’t understand.

So it was that at times like the Sunday I’ve just described, I found myself settling back into a cold, turgid solidity, not an opposition so much as an obstinacy, immovable, silent, and tight-lipped, that was, I was told, completely exasperating. At these times I assure you that I honestly could feel my responses battening down against the talk; I felt that what I really wanted was to enjoy what was left of the privileged life to which I and my kind have no particular right, and which exists, even in its present reduced condition, much as it was gained, by discrimination and exploitation. I felt, with a kind of irritated relief that I really belonged to that bad old good life which my parents helped push down into a dishonoured grave. At Oxford once, when I was talking like this, a rather drunk friend (I was rather drunk too) said that when I was in that sort of mood what I really inspired in others was a strong desire to kick me in my pompous backside; which pleased me very much.

Since India had been off their conscience, my family and their set had had an overwhelming supply of victims and their champions from Africa. First it was Seretse Khama, then Michael Scott, the Hereros, Nkrumah. Pamphlets about Dr Malan and the new Prime Minister of South Africa, Strijdom, about the Mau Mau, about Belgian colonial policy in the Congo, and self-government in Nigeria, piled up beside my mother’s bath, where she liked to do this sort of reading. Journalists, foreign correspondents, and crusading parsons who had been to shake a Christian fist in the face of the godless white oppressors in South Africa, came to dine and tell their tales. All this had had the usual effect on me; had rather put me off Africa.

When Faunce began to talk of sending me to South Africa to relieve Arthur Hollward, who had been the agent there for our firm, Aden Parrot, for fifteen years or so, most of my friends, and my mother, were at once in a flurry of excitement. What an opportunity! Wouldn’t I like to be briefed about the situation out there by a Negro doctor from Johannesburg who happened to be giving a series of lectures at a summer school in Kent? Wouldn’t I collect data about the housing of Africans for a world convention on housing which would be held in Stockholm next year? Would I look into the situation of the Indian minority? Would I be sure to visit the African College at Lovedale? Would I be willing to send a weekly newsletter on the effects of racial segregation?

I told them all that I would be going to Africa as a publisher’s agent, to visit bookshops and promote the sale of books. I didn’t want to investigate anything; I didn’t want to send newsletters home.

I had no intention of becoming what they saw me as, what they, in their own particular brand of salaciousness, envied me the opportunity to become — a voyeur of the world’s ills and social perversions. I felt, as I had so often before, a hostility, irritation, and resentment that made me want to shout, ridiculously: I want to live! I want to see people who interest me and amuse me, black, white, or any colour. I want to take care of my own relationships with men and women who come into my life, and let the abstractions of race and politics go hang. I want to live! And to hell with you all!

I lay on the deck and my immediate surroundings made nonsense out of that over-dramatic statement. The sky was so blue that it looked as if it might crack, splinter with the shining intensity of its blueness — rip as the sea did, spilling out seething whiteness where the ship cut through. The sun was blinding as a mirror or a miracle. You could not look upon his face; it was too much pagan glory for a human. Below me was the lido deck, where the water of the swimming pool tilted solidly with the slow roll of the ship, like a slice of green jelly. The children screamed as they cast themselves into the water in their rubber rings. A delicious smell of soup came before my nose and was snatched away by the wind. The men lay like dogs, basking almost naked round the feet of the women. The women wore big hats and dark glasses like a disguise, and you could not tell whether or not they were looking at you. I was barefoot and in swimming-trunks and could feel the sun leaning steadily on my shoulders. I was hungry again (it was only an hour since breakfast) and full of the pleasant consciousness of the desire to stretch my arms and legs.

It was our last day aboard. Early next morning we were to reach harbour in Durban. Miss Everard had asked for my address in Johannesburg because she wanted to send me a case of pineapples from her brother’s estate. Half-an-hour before, I had had a last swim with Rina Turgell and was amazed to notice that, despite her black woollen swim-suit with the school badge, she had a really beautiful body. One could not believe this when one saw her flat-chested and dressed. Had it happened on the voyage?

The chief steward — the light of frenzied creation in his eyes — was busy making swans and dolphins of ice, and neoclassical women out of butter, for the farewell dinner that night.

I Seemed to have progressed merely from one unreality to another. Before me, as I sat at dinner, I saw a swan made of ice carried by.