Here in Cape Town we talk of nothing else but the much awaited Cape Town Book Fair in June. I'm trying to wade through book suggestions from literary magazine and award bodies without much enthusiasm, since I find most of the books out of tune with my literary prefences. It has made me think about the books I've read and enjoyed in the past year. I'll talk us through them as I stock firewood for my fire place going to the Book Fair.
Some of us are wary of reading writers’ biographies, afraid of tedious hermeneutics. Usually these biographies are nothing more than fawning hagiography, or vitriolic criticism of the said writer’s work. Ronald Suresh Roberts scholastic biography of Nadine Gordimer, No Cold Kitchen, successfully avoids these trappings. It does not only delineate the life and times of the laureate but elegantly examines the body of her works without a trace of intellectual snobbery.
Roberts begins the book with a slightly hesitant tone—dancing on eggs and carefully skirting the muddy waters. The method of argument he adopts is the Socratic Phalanstery, i.e. the art of disguising derisive dismissals as innocent interrogations. This elenctic trick makes Roberts to cloak his own voice with myriads of quotations from NG (Nardine Gordimer) and her friends, of the calibre of Susan Sontag, Edward Said, Amos Oz, and numerous literary critics. It is only in the last section, Part 6, that Roberts’ voice comes out belching critical fire. In the end the method allows him to write what he calls a ‘worthwhile biography’ that ‘seeks intimacy without loyalty, proximity laced with dissent.’ The layers of dissent, perhaps, are what led to the fallout between the biographer and his subject that was given much currency in public discussion around the publication of the boo; but that is not our concern here.
We learn that NG and her sister are daughters of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, born in a small mining town outside Johannesburg called Springs. NG showed signs of artistic sensitivity from an early age and acumen of an autodidact. Her voracious appetite for books led her to the Vanguard, a Johannesburg bookshop then with European and North American contacts that had a decent supply of global periodics and literature. ‘Pioneering (South African) writers like Bloke Modisane and Todd Matshikiza worked at the Vanguard, as did an intense dabbler called Phillip Stein.’ Thus began NG’s time of flexing of critical faculties, ‘awakening sexuality, the conflation of emotional and aesthetic formation’.
In 1945 NG registered at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) for a degree in English. She soon found within months that her autodidactic temperament was ill-suited to tedious tottering of official education, and subsequently dropped out; not before meeting someone who became her life long black friend though, Esk’ia Mphahlele. From then her politics took on a more pronounced anti-imperialist & anti-racist tincture, albiet with cautious diplomacy that is visible in her fictional characters.
From all this emerges NG the author of fourteen novels—some of which won major world prizes for literature including the Nobel Peace prize in 1991—ten collection of short stories; and seven collection of essays. Her formative encounters touched the who is who of South African life in the 50’s, the so called “Golden Age” of the countries creative spirit. She met around then her lifelong friend also, Anthony Simpson, the then editor of Drum magazine to whom NG introduced Mphahlele. Drum started as a apolitical magazine, catering for black readers, with buxom modellers, tsotsi style narratives of every social thing that affected black people at the time, from prison stories to shebeen adventures. The glamour boys of Drum magazine were the likes of Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi, Nat Nkasa, Carrey Motsitsi, Arthur Maimane and of course, the indominatable Jim Bailey, the Drum publisher, all of which NG met and befriended.
In 1953, through a mutual friend Charles Engleton, NG met Reinhold Cassier, a Jew of Germanic background. They immediately hit it off and were married by beginning of 1954 to become not just husband and wife, but lifelong close companions, give or take few infidelities. No Cold Kitchen does not satisfy the susurrus voyeuristic curiosity aroused by some of Godimer’s fictional work like My Son’s Story. It just hints at a correlation to these and NG’s real life experiences. Reading NG’s latest work of fiction, nominated in the list of this 2006 Booker Prize, Get A Life, one hears the voice of an unfaithful woman confessing her infidelities with emotional depth palpating in catch your breath and rub your eyes lapidary phrases we’ve come to regard as the trademark of what's best in NG’s fiction:
The laughter together, the shared ironies of the proceedings, the delighted discovery, each for each, of how the other’s intelligent intention worked, the sense of something new, in man – woman, waiting to be acknowledged, life beckoning, crooking a finger, led to a room of a hotel . . .Anger bottled with disbelief in the days, weeks that followed. And pain. Pain has to be managed . . . He bore his pain and she bore his pain and anger. . . Facts are what constitute evidence, they do not go further than that. I have to tell you something. The affair is over.
I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.
NG dedicated Get A Life to Reinhold. Roberts uses like his vast knowledge of NG’s fictional work to examine, sometimes illuminate, incidences in NG’s life.
No Cold Kitchen is a worthy read even only for the in-depth intelligent discussion of South African politics of the time. Literature discussions on the book are saturate, sometimes water logged, with invidious comparisons with JM Coetzee whom Roberts regards as housing a ‘greater imaginative stamina’ than NG. Roberts is of the opinion that we should celebrate ‘Gordimer as the lyrical analyst of apartheid, and Coetzee as the great allegorist of anti-imperialism.’ We might add that if Coetzee is sluiced with Beckettean sarcasm, bleakness and psychological subtleties; NG has a better sense of differentiation and vocabulary insight that makes her adapt (at least does a better job compared to Coetzee) to the street and market place, which is why she’s better at reflecting other people’s culture.
No Cold Kitchen has social, intellectual and historical relevance, which is what most of us look for in a biography. It immerses you in NG’s life who chose to witness the dishonour of apartheid from within, somehow ‘suckling in the nipple of white privilege,’ the biographer insinuates. Her strength rests in the fact that she is her harshest critic. “We’re a useless lot among desperate people,” is how she described her lot during the heat season of apartheid years, which is harsh considering the contribution she made in fighting the system by living as a human being.
One constantly gets the feeling that Roberts puts NG on the docks concerning the apartheid issue. To most of us practising integrity to the free transformation of reality, in whatever forms and modes of expression is all that is required of a writer beyonding writting. I'll suggest anyone who has forgetten her contribution to start by reading her essay 1959: What Is Apartheid?1
1 No Cold Kitchen is published by STE Publishers.
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