Her children lived far away: Oriane in France and Hugo in America (though they were with her when she died). As she outlived her old friends, did she make some new, younger ones? One night she called on a mutual friend of hers and mine, the poet Lionel Abrahams, accompanied by the Chinese ambassador. Her friendship with him puzzled Lionel, and me too when he told me about it. Whatever did they have in common? Communist ideology? We could think of nothing else.
She had never been gregarious. She spoke of her "hand-picked friends". And she liked to give dinner parties. The food, sometimes prepared by herself, was good. And it was ample, though she herself ate abstemiously. When she was about 60 she told me with pride that she had "not put on an ounce" since the birth of her second child.
Though she did not snub people, her manner towards even her close friends was not warm. She strangely combined coldness with amiability, and even with sensuousness — manifest in her prose, those vivid descriptions.
For all her rather ascetic and abstemious ways, she cared very much about her appearance and gave time and thought to what she wore. Her voice was sharp. (A writer — I forget who — once said it was "like an electric carving-knife".) She was not without wit and humour, although neither shows much in her writing. Once when she was driving me to a PEN meeting where we were to read passages from our banned books, she warned me that a black poet who'd also be reading his work belonged to "the mother-fucker school of poetry". And when she and my father met at some formal reception and found themselves in company that neither of them cared for, she said to him, "These are close encounters of the turd kind."
A mutual friend told me that she died of pancreatic cancer, and that she also suffered in her last years from rheumatoid arthritis. Profound as were our differences, and long as it had been since we were together in friendship, I pity her pain and will feel her absence. Her death depletes my world.
Her books, or some of them, will live on, I think. Future generations may read her work and find pleasure and interest in it. Was it, in its day, a significant help towards black liberation? Possibly, though I am not convinced of it. What I absolutely cannot agree with is the almost universal consensus among intellectuals that Nadine Gordimer bestowed a great benefit on her country or the world. To have promoted and romanticised Communism as an ideal in the age of the gulag, the Ukrainian forced famine, the Chinese cultural revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, was not wise, or noble, or brave, or useful. It was immoral. It was impercipient. It was wrong.
Like this article? Share, save or print using the icons below:
3:09 PM
9:09 PM
9:09 AM