Nadine Gordimer: Farewell to a literary icon

GWEN PODBREY

The younger daughter of immigrants Isidore Gordimer (a Latvian watchmaker who opened a successful jewellery store in South Africa) and British-born Nan (née Myers), she was born in Springs on November 20 1923.

The Gordimers’ home was apolitical and almost completely devoid of Jewish tradition or education. However, while Jewishness was never a conscious point of reference in their daughter’s work, she displayed a curious ambivalence towards Israel and its policies, exhorting American writer Susan Sontag not to accept the illustrious Jerusalem Prize for literature in 2001 and becoming a signatory to the “Not in My Name” campaign, but ultimately refusing to equate Zionism with apartheid or endorse the delegitimisation of the state.

Gordimer penned her first story at the age of nine. Removed from school at the age of 11 due to suspected cardiac problems, she spent the next five years at home, in relative isolation. At the age of 13, she had a story published in the weekly Sunday Express and two years later, her first adult story was published in Forum.

During a one-year stint at Wits University, Gordimer encountered black writers and artists, notably through Drum magazine, which played a formative role in her political awakening.

In 1951, the New Yorker published her story A Watcher of the Dead, beginning her exposure to an international readership. In 1953 her first novel, The Lying Days, was published, an essentially idealistic work anticipating a multiracial future for the country.

Later novels, however, would be marked by cynicism. A member of the ANC and admirer of radical African visionaries such as Kwame Nkrumah, she had three of her works banned by the National Party government.

Her marriage to dentist Gerald Gavron in 1949 produced a daughter, Oriane, but the marriage ended in divorce after three years. In 1954 she married art dealer Reinhold Cassirer (who died in 2001), and a son, Hugo (today a New York-based filmmaker), was born the following year.

Gordimer’s involvement in politics resulted in close friendships with, among others, attorneys Bram Fischer and George Bizos, as well as Nelson Mandela, whom the two defended in his 1962 trial.

She hid fugitive ANC leaders in her own home and testified at the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial on behalf of 22 activists – an experience she described as “the proudest day of my life”.

When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, she was one of the first people he wanted to see. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, he recalled: “I tried to read books about South Africa or by South African writers. I read all the unbanned novels of Nadine Gordimer and learnt a great deal about the white sensibility.”

More recently, she was an outspoken critic of former President Thabo Mbeki’s disastrous handling of the HIV/Aids epidemic and a staunch supporter of the Treatment Action Campaign.

Novels such as A World of Strangers (1958), July’s People (1981), Burger’s Daughter (1979, based on the life of Bram Fischer, a work widely regarded as her opus magnum) and The Conservationist (1974) entrenched her status as a writer with a keen and fearless gaze and a masterful exponent of societies and individuals under political and moral stress. However, her dense, inturned style is not easily accessible, with many preferring her shorter fiction.

Ronald Suresh Roberts’ 2006 book – No Cold Kitchen – which began as an authorised biography of Gordimer, ended acrimoniously, with her disowning the work and accusing him of betraying her trust.

An intensely private person, Gordimer produced 14 novels and more than 200 short stories, with her work translated into 31 languages. Her many accolades included the CNA Prize for Literature (three times), the WH Smith Commonwealth Literary Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the prestigious Booker Prize and the Grand Aigle d’Or.

She was also a founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, held 15 honorary doctorates and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her massive achievements did much to earn South African literature – and the core of intrepid crusaders like herself, who exposed the human cost of its darkest historical chapter – global respect.