Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Of course, this society which excited me much and quite impartially was made up to a large extent of people for whom it was only a stage in the process of becoming placid, conventional citizens. As you have to be fish before fetus, so for a time they were liberal before conformist. They flirted a little with the vague stirrings of a sense of beauty, just as the fetus remembers a prehuman life in the sea, and then put away the Bach Chaconne and the Mozart Mass like toys outgrown, and turned to the real business of having babies and bridge afternoons. They put Balzac and Dante and Martin Buber where they looked impressive in the bookcase, and became family men concentrated on the fluctuations of the stock exchange and the relative merits of Buicks and Cadillacs. Men and women, when they reached forty-five, they would sometimes like to mention that they had gone in for that sort of thing once; they had also had measles or mumps and had at one time thought of going on the stage — this with a kind of helpless, satisfied smile at the children produced and the elegant house apparently grown up round them as unavoidably as a tortoise grows its shell.

They were unimportant. So were a great many others, who would never be writers, never be painters, never bring the legitimate stage to South Africa, or dance at Sadler’s Wells, although they lived, talked and worked in what they believed was the manner of people who did these things. In fact, this set of eager, intense, earnest and gay people consisted mainly of the intelligent pseudo, the hangers-on who at the time were quite indistinguishable from the few who were something: the few who were of them and in their midst and were in reality to become the writers, the painters, the actors, the dancers and even the leaders all believed themselves to be.

I do not think there was anything at the time to suggest that Leo Castle, the dark boy with the spotty forehead (he was working as a window dresser in a department store then, and ate the wrong food irregularly), had any more chance of becoming a ballet dancer instead of a window dresser who danced in the chorus of visiting musical-comedy shows once a year than his friend John Frederic, who did the same. Yet a year or two later he was dancing Comus in London, and The Rake’s Progress in New York, and in time a little book about him came out, showing him invested with all the satyrlike beauty of the male dancer at his best, in the company of people like Balanchine and Fonteyn. And Isa Welsh, always talking to some young man, with the tip of her tongue touching the corners of her mouth now and then as if she were a bashful adolescent. — Who would have believed that the book she was supposed to be writing would get finished and that she would divorce Tom and become one of the four or five important writers, writing intensely indigenous South African books from the self-imposed exile of England, America or Italy. Or Phil Hersh, wearing the same rather fluffy beard and haggard slouch as André, William Otter, or Hugo Uys; who would have marked him out for the painter of an epic of Africa as shocking and famous as Picasso’s “Guernica”?

I have said that all the barriers were down, and so saying have slipped into a South African habit of thought more national than any ideology; more difficult to outgrow than love or loyalty.

— I spoke as if European society were all of Africa. I spoke with the subconscious sense of the whole overwhelming Bantu race, waiting in submission outside the concepts of the white man. I spoke from our house on Atherton Mine, with Anna in her room in the back yard.

Among these people with whom I moved, the last great barrier was not down in the practical sense. How could it be? But it was coming down in their heads, an expansion in them was bursting through it. And even when it was achieved in the mind, in the moral sense and the sense of dignity, there remained the confusing pull of habit and use as well as the actual legal confines.

We were all like sleepers, coming awake from a long lull of acceptance. I know that I, who for all my childhood had lived surrounded by natives who simply attended our lives in one function or another — Anna, the gardenboys, above all, the stream of bare-breasted underground workers between the Compound and the shaft of the Mine — found with a real consciousness of strangeness and wonderment that I was beginning to think of them as individually human. They had passed before me almost as remote if not as interesting as animals in a zoo. I would not have been physically unkind to them because it was part of the strict pride of my upbringing that civilized people — what my parents would call “nice” people — were smug in their horror of squashing so much as a bug. If a hungry native came to our door, he was given food or even a sixpence. “At least they can’t go and spend it in a bar,” my mother, who would not give money to white tramps for this reason, would say. Anna, who by qualification of long years of working for us, was known as being “almost like a white person,” might be granted some concern over her family, but as a general rule, emotion was denied them and personal relationships were suspect. They have half-a-dozen husbands; every girl off the street’s a “sister.”—So they were casually denied love, jealousy, concern; everything that made us human. They were also denied entertainment (no swimming pools, libraries, radios), friendship—”I won’t have my back yard made into a location,” Atherton women boasted. “I’ve told her, no friends hanging about the room, you can meet them outside if you want them”—and personal pride: we children would be called out to be amused by the sight of the servant going out dressed up in her Sunday best. — In fact, everything that made our human state pleasant. And we white children had grown up innocently accepting and perpetuating this until now, when slowly we began to turn on ourselves, slowly we began to unravel what was tightly knit in us, to change the capacity of our hearts, the cast of our sense of humor, the limits of our respect. It was as painful and confusing as the attempt to change what has grown up with the flesh always is. And unlike the analyst, prizing down for the significant incident on which the complex and the cure are based, we could not triumph and say: There — it was everywhere, in the memory and the eye, the hand and the laugh.

It had begun for me with Joel and Mary Seswayo; I did not know which. Now when, the second or third time I went to the Welshs’ flat, Isa said, “Would that African girl of yours like to come along next time, d’you think?” I felt as I did so often in the slightly uncomfortable, impermanent-looking homes of these young people, a sudden sense of my own climate blowing upon me. The way someone from an American city or a Scandinavian seaport comes in the course of a summer cruise to some unimportant little foreign island he has never heard of before and suddenly recognizes the warm breath off the beach more deeply than the streets of Chicago or Copenhagen. “Or do you think music’d be a bit much for her?”

The high English laugh of Jenny Marcus sailed out, a girl commanding attention in the pinkness and assertion of shape and flesh that sometimes precedes the ugly stage of pregnancy quite dazzlingly. “It’s all right for you, Isa, you haven’t got a servant. Whenever John wants to bring Nathoo Ram home for dinner I have to let Hilda go off. And he’s only an Indian, that’s not so bad. But the next day I always feel her looking at me in contempt; she knows he’s been there. Nothing infuriates your own servant more than the idea that you’ve lowered yourself to eat with a non-European.”

“And Nathoo Ram, too.” Her husband turned his head from his own talk. “I always see him look anxiously into the kitchen and see with relief old Jen battling there. …”