None to Accompany Me
by Nadine Gordimer
List Price: $13.95
Pages: XXX
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0140250395
Publisher: Penguin USA
Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in Springs, a small gold-mining town
thirty miles from Johannesburg. Her parents were Jewish ÈmigrÈs, her mother
from England and her father from Latvia; he ran a jewelry store in town
where Gordimer attended an all-white convent school. Gordimer credits
Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, about oppressed Chicago
meatpackers, with opening her eyes to the plight of the black mine workers
in Springs. Her focus, though, in life as well as work, has always been
on the individual experience. In a 1991 interview in The New York
Times, Gordimer describes being "drawn into politics not through
ideas but through friendships with many black people through the years.
Little by little, I began to see what I was a part of."
Gordimer's first short story was published when she was fifteen. Her writing career took off when The
New Yorker printed a story in 1946, and her first collection appeared
three years later. She has since published seven volumes of short stories
and eleven novels, which have been translated into twenty languages. Gordimer
has won some of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, including
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. A vocal member of the long-outlawed
African National Congress, she is also a founder of the predominantly
black Congress of South African Writers.
One of apartheid's fiercest critics, Nadine Gordimer has long been considered a preeminent interpreter
of South Africa, and also its conscience. Her life is a vivid portrait
of, in her words, what apartheid means in human terms.
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A superb stylist, Nadine Gordimer
has no need for polemic or finger-wagging. Firmly grounded in physical
and psychological detail, memorably evoking the texture of daily life
for South Africans of every stripe, her books have earned world-wide acclaim.
In the words of The New York Times Book Review, "Gordimer...
can not only capture but express in the lives of human beings those moments
which are so fleeting, so impalpable, as well as so common that they are
overlooked by all but a very rare artist." She spoke to us on May
1, 1995, from her home in Johannesburg.
Q:None to Accompany Me is your first novel set in post-apartheid
South Africa. It seems to me that your canvas is now more complex and
ambiguous. Is that true?
A: I think
it's quite true, and also immensely interesting and challenging. For example,
take a simplistic idea we all had: that people in exile were longing to
come home, had been dreaming about it for many years. Then they came home
and the dream of home is different from the reality. There's the very
fact that you can now live differently - there's no more residential segregation.
Those who can manage it simply move into the equivalents of Greenwich
Village, Soho, nice white suburbs. It means a whole new pattern of living.
I have young friends, my children’s ages, mad keen to move into the
city. They move, mostly into apartments in very heavily populated parts
of the city, thinking that all the things that oppressed them in the townships
- crime, overcrowding - will now be solved. But the fact is that there
are other forms of predators in these heavily populated neighborhoods,
lots of muggings, all sorts of confidence men just waiting to take in
the gullible. There's also a complete loss of neighborliness. In Soweto,
your neighbors would look after a sick kid if you had to go to work; there
was a wonderful sense of solidarity you don't have in the city. To a certain
extent this experience is portrayed by Oupain in None to Accompany
Me.
Now we have illegal immigrants
from Korea and mainland China, you walk down the street and suddenly hear
black Zairians talking to each other in French, there are Nigerians running
a big drug racket. All these new phenomena will come into the work of
writers.
Q: A few years ago, you commented that censors "don't even bother with
nonfiction books now. They go after the news media and they accomplish
their ends by controlling coverage." Do you think that fiction is
even less influential than nonfiction?
A: I think
fiction influences lots of people. It certainly contributed to anti-apartheid
movements abroad, and to the understanding of apartheid. What fiction
did that TV news couldn't do, that newspaper headlines couldn't do, was
to show through the lives of fictional characters - drawn, of course,
from real life - what apartheid meant in terms of distorting those lives.
The TV screen shows the raid, the moment of crisis, children advancing
against tear gas, shots fired. You didn't see what happened afterwards,
what they went home to, how they put their lives together again. That
is the dimension of fiction.
Certainly they underestimated
the power of fiction. What people saw in the media was just a moment of
sensation. We wrote about the lives of people, and that roused a lot of
consciousness about what was happening in South Africa.
Q: Do you see a lot of young South Africans like Mpho, very much a product
of two cultures? Do they feel dispossessed?
A: There are
lots of Mphos around. They're usually fortunate to have had a decent education
outside; they tend to belong to an elite here. In another way they have
some difficulties in establishing themselves as part of the black population.
Some, unlike my Mpho, have at least a smattering of their parents' language
because their parents kept it up wherever they happened to be exiled.
Q: When Didymus realizes that Sally was ashamed that he had served as an
interrogator, he rationalizes that, "she was a woman, after all;
she could understand the revolution but she didn't understand war."
Why the distinction?
A: I think
it was very much a male view. He decides she can't understand what he
might have done because it's not a woman's business. She hasn't been to
war. Didymus is prepared to assume that his experience is alien to her.
The ugly things that come along with war, she balks at, and he thinks
that's a feminine characteristic.
Q: Do you?
A: I don't
know. She is a revolutionary. But it's like people who can eat meat but
don't want to think about the abattoir.
Q: Is she any less realistic than he?
A: No. But
human beings have their blind spots, their failings. Perhaps he's right,
that this is what she does feel, but he doesn't confront her. But I don't
necessarily think what my characters think.
Q: Some questions about marriage and romantic love in None to Accompany
Me. The marriage of Vera and Bennet is one of the axes of the book.
In the end Bennet sees "that Vera never ever really wanted a husband--
only for a time, when it excited her to have her lover domesticated."
Do you think some people are temperamentally suited for marriage and others
are not?
A: Definitely.
We all know people who really are very good at marriage, others who in
many ways are immensely capable, adaptable, but simply not good at marriage.
Q: In the end, Vera is repulsed by Bennet's need for her. Can there be love
without need, marriage without possession?
A: No, I don't
think so. It’s often part of the battle that comes in marriage. Another
common thing, also with Vera and Bennet, is that one partner moves on
in one direction and the other goes in another. Or worse still, is left
behind. That is what happens to Bennet. Vera feels that this puts too
much pressure on her.
Q: In the book you talk about sex as a way to shed the burden of self, to
achieve the illusion of belonging to someone else. Do you think men look
at sex the same way as women do, to achieve that same purpose?
A: I think
so, I think this is a universal. The burden of self is a very heavy thing.
Q: Is everyone's life a journey to the self?
A: Everyone's
is. Not all admit it, or want to recognize it. But it is there, unavoidable.
Q: Vera thinks she's made Annie a lesbian because her own sexuality asserted
it over the needs of her daughter. That seems a guilty sort of logic.
A: You're right. She's full of guilt there, wishes to free herself, but like most
people, finds it extremely difficult. She accepts Annie's homosexuality
more than Bennet does, because she comes out with it honestly in that
conversation.
Bennet is really rather cowardly.
When you make people (awful phrase), you do it very often in an objective
way because that's the only way it has any value. Otherwise you are going
to superimpose your own heroes, so to speak, on the contradictions that
are in human nature. If you look at Ben one way, he's a good man, loyal,
loving. But is that always a good thing if it's taken, as in his case,
to excess? Novelists ask questions, they don't give answers. So that's
a question about Ben. It's not even that easy, because if he's such a
loving person, why does he ignore what turns out to be the need that Annie
solves in her own way? He doesn't wish to see or understand her life.
Q: Do you think parents really shape their children's sexuality in that way?
A: I don't
know. My point is that Vera believes it, not really rationally but out
of her own sense of guilt. She feels she's made her daughter miss something
because she herself is so wholly and fundamentally heterosexual. She is
a great lover of men.
Q: At the end, Vera is blinded by the stars and freezing cold. Has she "gone
too far?"
A: No, she
hasn't. There's some exaltation there.
Q: What's the purpose of her late-night encounter with the woman in Rapulana's
house?
A: It shows
her acceptance that Rapulana still has that side to his life, that kind
of pleasure and fulfillment, and that her relationship with him is such
that she's glad of it.
Q: How much
of your own experience is reflected in Vera's life, in the nature of her
work?
A: None. Because
I'm not a lawyer. She's involved professionally. My political involvement,
oddly enough, has been on a much more personal level than hers. I've never
done any work like hers to bring me into the kinds of contexts she has.
Q: I read
an article describing a lonely childhood in which you spent long hours
alone in the library. Is that true?
A: I didn't
spend them in the library, I took the books home with me. But that library
did mean everything in the world to me.
Q: Did you
have a favorite childhood book?
A: I read
the usual things, very much centered on a world I knew nothing about:
Arthur Ransome, the Dr. Doolittle books, those rather awful books
that came from Canada, I believe, the Anne of Green Gables books.
But from the age of about twelve, I just wandered around, picking stuff
off the shelves. Nobody stopped me. I read Gone With the Wind,
which came out that year, 1936, and Pepys Diary with equal pleasure.
Nobody said, This is good, that is not so good. I just followed my own
tastes and needs, and I think it was lucky and very valuable.
Because so many people are
semi-literate, there's a movement here encouraging people to produce simplified
versions of books, with smaller vocabulary. I'm totally against this,
because I was always reading books that were too difficult. The only way
you learn to read with true comprehension is from context. You learn vocabulary
the way you never could from just looking up in the dictionary. I think
it's condescending to simplify, to assume that people won't make the effort
to understand a word or phrase that doesn't come to them immediately.
Q: You never
discuss your work in progress with anyone. Why?
A: Never.
I'm sort of superstitious about it. I have no desire to. You've got to
do it on your own; it's only confusing to get other opinions while it's
in progress.
I've just been re-reading that
rather marvelous book called Genesis of a Novel, by Thomas Mann,
written when he was in exile in California writing Dr. Faustus. I was
amazed to see that he was constantly reading chunks aloud to family and
friends, getting their views, occasionally - even following their advice.
I was really astonished at this. So every writer works in his or her own
way.
Q: When readers
of None to Accompany Me want more Gordimer, which of your books
would you recommend?
A: I'd like people to read a rather fat and ignored novel of mine, called A Guest
of Honor, which I wrote in the early seventies. It's not set in South
Africa, but in an imaginary African country. In terms of some of the post-colonial
situation, if you're looking at the book's political side, A Guest
of Honor has been in a sense prophetic.
The other book that I would rather like people to read is my novel The Conservationist; it's
my most lyrical novel. When I write a novel, I always have to hear it
in my head in the right voice. Is it going to be in the first person?
Is it all going to be in the past tense, or will that alternate with the
present tense? Will it also alternate between different voices? The main
part of The Conservationist is seen from the interior of a male
character who is completely removed from me, quite antipathetic, though
not a villain. Things are very much seen through his eyes, and I didn't
make any concessions to the reader. I require that they make a leap of
the imagination with me. It was a very difficult book to write, and that's
probably why I have a feeling for it, because I think I pulled it off.
Excerpted from None to Accompany Me © Copyright 2008 by Nadine Gordimer. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.
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