 Good evening. Welcome to the 23rd annual John Howard Burst, Jr. Memorial keynote event entitled Writing and Political Activism, the work of South African writer Nadine Gordimer. I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Library Services at Roger Williams University, and along with my colleague, Professor Adam Braver, Library Program Director, we thank you all so much for coming. Please know this event is being recorded this evening. The John Howard Burst program includes this evening's keynote event, and two exhibitions, a comprehensive virtual exhibition, and a smaller physical exhibit, mounted in the university library prepared by University Archivist Heidi Benedict and Honors Program student fellows. Adam will put the link in the exhibition to the exhibition in the chat and we hope that you'll view it later it's really quite a quite a wonderful exhibit. The annual Burst program celebrates a great writer of literature and their body of work. This year's selection, the work of Nadine Gordimer was selected by the university's Burst committee with representation from Roger Williams faculty staff and a member of the Rogers Free Library staff which is our public library in Bristol. We're hugely grateful to Robert Blaise, an alumnus of RWU, who with his gift to the university in the year 2000 made these events possible. Mr. Blaise's endowment was in honor of his mentor and friend, Professor John Howard Burst Jr., a scholar of Herman Melville, a founder of the Melville Society, and a collector of letters and rare first editions. The Blaise gift supports an exhibition, a library book fund for collecting works related to the exhibit, travel for student fellows to archives and libraries associated with the author and a keynote event. The Blaise program is a panel discussion and we're honored to have with us novelist Claire Massoud, New Yorker book critic James Wood, and Robert Boyer's editor-in-chief of Selma Gundy magazine, who has been a key partner in this year's Burst program. With that, I'll hand it over now to Professor Boyer's to introduce our panelists and this evening's format. Bob. All right, thank you very much. Great deep pleasure to be here tonight with two close friends on this panel. And of course, we're all very grateful to Adam Braver for conceiving of this event. You know, Nadine Gordon was born 100 years ago in 1923. She was, of course, a South African writer, not only in the sense that she spent her life in that country, but in the sense that most of her fiction is set there. She found ways to engage consistently with the people and politics of South Africa without ever suggesting that her vision was merely local or parochial. She seemed to us a writer who was interested in everything important to us, wherever we live, whatever our own provisional perspectives. My old teacher kind of Cruz O'Brien wrote of her in the New Yorker view of books many years ago, that it is to gain if she most brings to mind, I couldn't help thinking that for all of his deep immersion in the fabric of Russian life, to gain was never merely a Russian writer, any more than Gordimer was merely a recorder of things South African. I liked very much what Joyce Carol Lowe said of Gordimer's great novel Burgers Daughter, that it is a novel of social and political which is also an intensely subjective prose poem, lots to unpack in that insight. My sense is that Gordimer is not as widely read by literary people in this country as she was 20 or 30 years ago. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that she is no longer bringing out a new novel every few years, or publishing stories, all the time in the New Yorker, or Harper's or my own Salmakundi. Perhaps it is more to do with other factors, for example, with the fact that South Africa is no longer in the news in the way it was during the apartheid era. Perhaps with the fact that Gordimer was always an uncompromising writer, whose work is apt to seem especially demanding to readers who want their fiction to be more comforting and confirming. At any rate, we're here this evening to talk about a great writer, and to raise questions that will seem useful and provocative, though we will feel free to travel where we like. I will assume only that at least some of us have read three short stories that we tried to make available to people attending this session. Eventually, the three of us will provide brief summaries of those stories and speak at least a little about them, and we'll use our observations as a springboard for conversation about Gordimer's vision and politics. But now I thought we might begin with a passage from a recent interview with the art critic Jed Pearl, which I thought might prompt our first conversation. Pearl says that when he was working on his own recent book on authority and freedom, he looked at some of Leon Trotsky's ideas about the freedom of the artist. Trotsky believed, Pearl says, that the artist who acted freely was contributing to a deeper understanding of the world we live in, and thereby furthering the revolutionary struggle, unquote. According to Trotsky, that's why artistic freedom is worth defending. This view, according to Jed Pearl, has remained enormously appealing. It is unfortunate, Pearl argues, that many of us believe that the artist or writer who isn't offering a response to our social and political circumstances is failing and in fact acting irresponsibly. The term Pearl uses to get at this demand system is the stranglehold of relevance, and I thought we might begin this evening with that. And so, dear friends, would you say that the interest that many people had in Nadine Gordimer over many decades had mainly to do with her way of furthering the revolutionary struggle, and that she was, in that sense, an instance of the stranglehold of relevance. So I put that to the two of you as a way to get started here. I might start by saying that I think her career was so long, and that it evolved, and she evolved as a writer also, and she evolved in her political self-identifications and self-understandings, I think. And in fact, one of the things that seems to me sort of extraordinary, because this was before my time, so it's something that I came to understand, is that she was publishing from the very early 50s, she was publishing in American magazines, including The New Yorker, but a number of other, The Yale Review, I think, a number of American magazines from very early on, and that surely was not common for South African writers, young, I mean quite young South African writers at that time. And so I think even, I mean there is in her case, there are many layers, there's the fact she was already a writer, a fiction writer of note and of record, before perhaps people were fully aware of her as in some way somebody writing, if you will, almost emblematically about the white left in South Africa, but by the time I was aware of her as a writer, when I was young in the 80s, I think there's certainly a case to be made that she was suffering from this little hold of relevance that that one of the reasons we were aware of her and I think it may be difficult for young people right now to understand or appreciate how important that discourse about South Africa and and the fight against apartheid was at the time that I was a student. When I was an undergraduate at my university, there was a, there was Winnie Man Della City, a tent encampment outside the, the largest dining hall that was there for, I want to say two years with demonstrations protesters, trying to get the university to divest their investments in what really was the, the sort of central focus of a lot of student activism. When I was young so so that's how I came to her as a writer in that context and and and I, I was not aware. So much later of the work that she had written you know, long before that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I completely agree with Claire that this, when we were growing up, that's to say when we were sort of coming of age in the, in the 80s, late 80s and early 90s, and I was first beginning to write reviews. The, the, the politics and plight of South Africa was absolutely immediate in Britain to was absolutely central. A lot of that had to do with the fact that Mrs Thatcher broke with the rest of the Commonwealth in objecting to sanctions. She was sort of conservative stance, and she stuck by it she argued that economic sanctions punished everyone and achieved little. And it was right through the 80s that was a constant sort of internal British political discussion. Yes, it was an absolute defining political issue of, of the time. And the question, Bob, you ask is, is, to what extent has the eclipse of Gordama's reputation to what extent is it tied to that context. Before you answering that you'd have to say that she's not the only writer these days to be suffering from a kind of advanced irrelevance, should we say, right, for every Gordama. There's a, you know, we can think of three or four other. I mean, you know, 15 years ago if you walked into a classroom and you said the name Ian McEwen. Thanks to atonement. Everyone knew who you were talking about. If you say now Ian McEwen, it's not clear that anyone will have read him. And in a few years time, it may be the case that no one's ever even heard of him. This is just an accelerated pace of sort of literary obsolescence that we're all having to to deal with Gordama is a particular casualty of that. Perhaps, as you suggest, because of this, this, this, the connect the ways in which her work were connected to, to her political circumstances. Great. Yeah, in fact, when I when I read that passage of Jed pearls and I, and I thought about Gordama, I thought, well, I don't think Gordama herself would ever felt have felt that she was herself caught in the stranglehold of relevance. Gordama is writing about what she was interested in and what she was passionate about. She, she didn't write what she wrote because she wanted to appeal to, to people who are had a special interest in the politics of South Africa it's what she was. But in some way, I think what we're getting out here is is that the stranglehold of relevance may have something to do with the audience with with the readership and so on. And that it is we who find it difficult right to remain deeply invested in the work of writers who seem to us compelling and important because they were writing about things we were interested in, all apart from their, you know, virtues as as novelists, you know. Yeah, so let me ask another question that's related to this and it's related to something less clear you want to jump in there. I was going to say, I mean, I think she's somebody if you, if you read interviews with her or essays of hers. She's somebody who who felt that that her writerly self was paramount and that that that she had a political activist self. She was engaged in actual, you know, ANC activism, but that that was separate, you know, that was distinct from her work, and that she was writing about people who were living under apartheid or who had lived under apartheid and were in. And that's the degree to which her work was political, right, it wasn't about forwarding some, you know, putting forward some particular political message. And I, and I have to wonder whether that complexity or that nuance is part of what makes her a challenging writer for people in this moment, perhaps I mean, in that sense, in that sense, you can interestingly use her against Jed Pearl's Trotsky thing about, you know, literature furthers the revolution because yes, her activism activism was certainly about furthering the revolution and and she was willing to be, you know, arrested and censored and so on for that. You know, I think she she joined the ANC when it was still a an illegal organization. There's an interesting question as to whether her writing could be said to further the revolution, given that her writing is actually often about ambiguous. First of all, but it's often about white South Africans, or liberal white South Africans in relation to secondarily black South Africans. And secondly, that it's often about. It's actually often about ideological failure. It's about the inability of two sides to make connections with each other precisely the inability to to get together and and and create the promised utopia. You know, I agree. In fact, I mean the, the question I wanted to follow with grows out of something that she said in an interview we conducted with many years ago, 40 years ago. And we were asking we were asking her why, in spite of the fact that her books were briefly banned, and why in spite of the fact that she was threatened on numerous occasions with house arrest and that sort of thing. And she was able to continue doing her work to move in and out of South Africa at a time when other dissidents were not permitted to travel around and leave the country and speak at public forums in the way that she did. And she said, well, of course, one factor was the support she received from writers all over the world, who protested any any threats that were made against her. But she also said that she had a sense that her own books were in this a quote is were actually difficult books. And she said of burgers door you can hardly call it a rabble browsing book. It was clearly she said unlikely to inflame the masses. And so now I, you know, there's a question that sometimes when I think about difficulty in the book that that that I find myself discussing with my students when I'm teaching Gordamer's novels and my classes. I think you whether you thought that that made Dean was in fact a difficult writer. James I'll let I'll let you take that question first. I think any writer is difficult, who, who takes on questions of questions of ideological struggle, and also who takes on sort of questions of transition that's to say, she's, she's often interested in, in, in the question of what will become of South African society when and if the promised utopia occurs what will happen in that passage between a corrupt stable unjust society, and a unknown new longed for unjust society. That's always going to be, that's going to be, that's going to be a difficult terrain to cross and I think any writer who, who looks honestly at that and then second, second, second to that looks honestly at the ambiguities, shall we say and contradictions, sometimes hypocrisies of liberal privilege is not going to offer, you know, is not is is is likely to be quite friendless. It seems to me as a, as a writer right that's a that's a difficult, it's a difficult thing to do and I, it's an interesting question. If you look at someone like Gordema, who are the, who exactly you look around now who are the writers who are writing in this specific way, right there are, there are easy ways to, to make fun of liberal era. There are easy ways to, to produce manifestos for a promised utopia, but who is looking in complex ways at the moment about sort of varieties of ideological failure, that's what really interests me about her work. I might, I might jump in if I'm on a sort of slightly other note which is, I, I, I think, you know, again, the sort of length of her career I mean there's also a stylistic evolution and I think she became an increasingly. I mean, in literally just a sort of stylistic sense she became an increasingly difficult writer there's a sort of compression, and, and, and maybe not quite fragmentation but, but, but, but I was reading rereading some of the early stories and they're wonderful and they're very beautiful, but they do have a sort of Trevor, William Trevor like lucidity and sort of evenness of, of tone, that I feel that in varying degrees the stories that we're looking at this evening would all, I think come into a later period, I mean the soldiers the earliest of them, but they're all later stories and you can see in, in, in the, the, the compacted nature of the free and direct style that the way that it's working. And it does require attention from a reader you can't, you can't sort of, you know, whip through it in the bathtub or, you know, in a noisy coffee shop you actually have to pay attention to the way she's deploying language and, and, and, and that it's, and it's direct meaning because it's quite layered so I think she's difficult, not just in terms of import but I think she's, she's a challenging writer in that sense and in that she is precisely because, because things are nuanced and layered, but also she's done, I when I'm teaching I try to say to my students you know you want to it's like a soup you want to you want to sort of distill it you want to boil it down and make it intense and and very flavorful right so that it's not watery and spread out and and her her her work is absolutely that in the best literary sense I mean you know but but it does it isn't easy no I agree in fact I mean one of the questions it's it's of course in some ways it just sounds like a sort of a standard academic question but in the case of Gordemer you don't address it in a standard academic way one of the questions we're always looking at together in a classroom where we have a Gordemer text in front of us is whose point of view is it that we're getting in this passage how different is it from the point of view we're getting in this other passage two pages later why is there no transition from the one to the other and I mean that's and that's a sort of a consistent sort of element I think in the readerly attention that you would describe and clear that you know that we we have to pay when we return absolutely yeah I would which which is which rewards the effort you know it is it is thrilling to read these stories but it is but I think the the marriage if you will of the difficulty of of of content right that there aren't easy answers and there aren't easy solutions and there there isn't a sort of either rosy or simple simply dark you know worldview you know and then you add that the sort of stylistic intensity to that and it's true it's you know it's it's I remember this is this is a digression but I remember the writer Rachel Cohen telling me that she had this is some years ago but that she had been looking at she was for a project rereading Sontag's work and was looking just at the sentence structures of of her work in the 60s right through to her you know late work and she said you know the sentence structures become simpler she's becoming deliberately more accessible it's something that she wanted to to to do is to reach more readers and and in a funny way I mean it's not that these the sentences are syntactically difficult but but the but the density of the pros is sort of the opposite in Gordamer's case right it isn't becoming easier it's becoming it's becoming more demanding of the reader I think yeah no I agree I agree well you know I think we will come back to this kind of conversation I think we'll have time to do it but maybe we ought to to do this other thing which is to to turn to stories and I want people who haven't read the stories who are with us in this audience not to to fear that they won't be able to follow the conversation because each of us will in turn when it comes to the story we're we're dealing with say something to to sort of summarize the story and then we'll sort of talk around it so I think James if you don't mind if you are with James or Claire who's going to I think Claire you're going to start first with mission statement I'm happy to start if that's if that's helpful unless James well let's start with mission statement which which is the longest of course of the stories that we we we have before us and it was published it was in the collection in 2003 I'm not actually sure when it was it may have been it was it published separately I'm not sure of the date if so but it has as its protagonist a woman named Roberta Blaine Nate Cartwright who who has come to to an unnamed African country to be the assistant to the administrator of an of an NGO of an international aid agency and and her her boss is someone named Alan Henderson and his wife is named Flora and at first we know only that we know only that she is in in Africa but posted in Africa for the first time having been posted in a number of other countries around the world and only over time perhaps I'm I am I am telling this out of order but only over time do we come to understand that her grandfather was a colonial she is British and that her grandfather was a colonial in this in this country and in fact that there's a paragraph story that opens a sort of mini story that opens the short that this piece that you don't have a context for until much later and then you understand that it is a family story that was told by her grandfather and involves the master of the the master at the manager's house so the white landowner sending sending his servant his black servant to walk 50 miles to town to carry back liquor a box of liquor on his head every week so he has to walk and then walk back and and it's a sort of it says the feet was a famous dinner party story each weekend that's my man what heads they have a thick as a log and we don't know where that what that has to do with the story that we're reading until fairly far into the into the story and it's about her her nascent and developing first a business relation or semi-business relationship and increasingly friendship and then eventually romantic relationship with with a a man whose role is the deputy director of land affairs in the country's government and his name is Gladwell Shadrach Shabruma and he initially is very for a long time is very formal but we follow we follow various visits first first they have drinks then he comes to visit her at her house then he takes her on a day outing to his his uncle's property then he takes her to his country house where she expects to meet his wife he does have a wife but does not meet his wife and and by the end they become they become lovers and at the end of her posting um he suggests that they get married and she she says oh i would never want to cause a divorce and he um and he he says no it's not a divorce i had in mind i i uh i thought you could be my second wife that's our tradition um and and and at that point she speaks to flora henderson and to alan henderson about this uh and they they are oddly um they they they are they seem oddly in favor of this she can't countenance it um and and takes offense at this at this proposal but but they both i think thinking that um there there there would be advantages on both sides this woman is in her 40s and is unmarried and um this this would give her a an interesting life in a place in the world and standing and so on um but but it's it's worth saying that that that um and there are lots of other things to say about it but it's worth saying that she has um after a moment of intimacy after they've had sex um she has divulged to him the the fact that that his um the history of her grandfather and the fact that that um that gladwell shabruma's property is very near where her grandfather's property was near something called buffalo mine and he has said to her um he he has granted her absolution he said that has nothing to do with you you know she's ashamed of this terrible history and he said that has nothing to do with you it was the tradition and she has this thought as she's pondering his proposal and she thinks he granted me um he granted me absolution as it were and i mean well when i'm confronted with his tradition i indict him but um but she but she does she will leave the country she is gonna go so that's that's a a longish sorry maybe too long summary of the story yeah do you want to jump in with there james i i have some questions you might want to well just as claire was talking what i was admiring was this was just this this formal you know this formal symmetry in a way that that gordon was so good at i don't just mean the obvious thing of white woman black african they become lovers will they marry uh no they won't um she comes you know she has a history through her grandfather of a sort of inheritance as it were uh a colonial inheritance but she's now coming as the kind of modern manifestation of that uh in terms of um you know aid agency work and so on um yeah but it it wasn't so much that it was just what claire how claire was describing it as the as this as the as the moment when they're in bed and she starts to to weep and she tells him about she just tells him about her grandfather and this story of sending the man 50 miles and she's she's crying out of shame and guilt and so on and he this patterning the way in which he absolves her uh and then she indicts him uh at the end of the uh of the of the story um is i think just quite beautifully done and as claire was saying that the you could see you can see all the ways when i lay it out like that this is what's so fascinating about fiction generally right if i lay it out like that it sounds like a it sounds like i've made a very neat little ideological schema right i've set it all up and you know but in fact the the whole question of of her marrying him at the end is really subtly handled because it seems self-evident to him it's just like i'll marry you you will get married it's it seems strange and almost outrageous to her right which is that's not going to happen at the same time as claire was saying her her her white boss alan and flora his wife are very in favor of it but for but for a mixture of reasons one of which has to do with just the which she doesn't know which has to do with the fact that they just think well she's 47 she's on the shelf she'd just better it'd be better for her if she just got married right she doesn't know that they give official ideological reasons it would be you know be interesting for you he needs a wife he's going to become a minister in the in the in the new government he needs a wife of status so he can take to parties you or you or she and so on but actually it's a wonderfully complex ideological pats cradle that's going on at the end which i i really liked if i might just jump in because it wasn't something i i i mentioned earlier but but there i mean there's there is a sort of feminist layer to this story also because she is the assistant and and her canadian boss makes every effort to consult her and include her opinion and and this over time alters the way that she's treated by the other by the by the government employees and and other aid people that they encounter and and and it's there's a moment where it is it's wonderfully a passive construction i think where it says it's noted that she that she drinks scotch rather than the beer that you know i mean so she sort of distinguishes herself as a hard liquor woman you know that that makes her closer to the lads you know but but but there is as part of this he is always glad while shabruma is very calm and quite reserved but also quite assertive and repeatedly he doesn't say shall we get married he says i will marry you and and and that's the culmination of a whole lot of moments where he is he is taking initiative and and and and sort of making statements and and and she is both and i think um gordon recaptures very well um robertus ambivalence about that that that on the one hand she's loving it on the other sometimes she's like huh i don't is that what i i don't know if that's what i want yeah that's great there's there's um there's one moment um in in the story when flora um her robertus boss's wife um observes that um gladwell's wife is not and this the word not an asset she's not an asset uh the sense is that um when if you marry this man you will become an asset and you will become someone who can think of herself um in that way in a way perhaps you have not been quite ready to do up until now she has thought of herself at various points of the story as very decidedly a subordinate not a person who's terribly ambitious who has a great sense of herself as destined to rise in the hierarchy and of the of the aid organization and so on and this is in in that sense an opportunity to become truly an asset and i think you're right claire i mean i i i read that also as a kind of a feminist element in in the way the story was conceived absolutely and there's another thing i might add which is is is that's a thread it's just a thread through the piece which is about property and and and the way when roberta arrives and she moves into a house that has been you know it's a house for uh for visiting NGO people right and there's this and there's this uh sense of the impersonality of it the ghosts of the previous people with the hangers she knows she's picked the right best the right bedroom because it's the one where the previous person's hangers are still in the cupboard it's the one that the the previous person chose also but then there's this little aside which is that the housekeeper and the and the um i'm not sure if that there's a man who takes care of the property um that they they are um they are delivering their behaving as though it's a home and they they plant flowers and they take care of it as though it's a home and these are of course um you know local black employees who are who are creating a sense of of of of density or texture in this kind of weird ghost house but but i mentioned it because later um what when she's thinking about what she'll miss when she leaves she says i'll miss i'll miss his farm i'll miss his country house that's what i'm going to miss where i can go and ride a horse and be free and right and and of course the peculiar dark irony not stressed by Gordimer but totally present is that of course that's the precisely colonial land that her grandfather had claimed right on which so the thing that she's going to miss is exactly the same thing that her grandfather left behind you know came and cleaned and left behind so um so you know she manages even in that sort of it's not a big thread but that thread through the narrative she manages to make all sorts of points about how territory is working and land is working um for the different people uh in this place yeah that's great um well this obviously there's so much more um we can say but uh maybe maybe we'll circle around back to uh to mission statement but i thought james maybe we would move to uh a soldier's embrace and then absolutely look forward this is an uh an earlier story published in in 1982 um like a mission statement it's also set in an unnamed country um it's interesting how spare uh often Gordimer's fiction is with with that kind of local texture she quite quite likes the the the the nameless or placeless or not placeless exactly but un unnamed allegory allegorical place um so it's set in an unnamed um uh african country where there has recently been a there is there there has recently been a ceasefire after a war between uh colonialist soldiers and and and black indigenous freedom fighters um and it centers on a white lawyer husband a white lawyer uh and her and his wife um and the story begins with the they're not named um the story begins with the wife um sort of walking into the town square as extraordinary celebrations to celebrate the ceasefire have erupted and the title of the story comes from the fact that she is embraced suddenly on both sides by a white soldier and a black soldier who are each just happy that that the things over that war is over and peace has been called and in their excitement they they they give her a a hug and it's one of many ways in which this story is beautifully put together because that's the that's our first and most important image and it's clearly a utopian one and over the course of what's actually a pretty short story we are going to see that it's an impossible utopian one too in other words it begins as a as iconic and slowly begin it slowly it steadily fades away as an impossibility but initially things look good um for this white couple they've been at the center of the struggle for black independence um the white lawyer is and his wife are friendly with many of the main figures of the of the of what will be the new government um and it's only over the course of several months that they begin to realize that possibly they don't have much relevance to go back to our our word they don't have much relevance um they don't have the relevance they hope for um for this new black government um the lawyer thinks maybe he'll get a professorship there's some talk about how he might be involved in drafting the new constitution nothing comes of it um a friend of theirs a young man who had been a protégé of theirs um called uh chapande who looks as if he's going to be a big fish in the new government uh comes over to the house and they're of course very excited and and they want to celebrate this victory with their black friend um but suddenly he's full of uh a kind of self importance or just distraction whatever um he he makes it clear that he doesn't have a great deal of time he's not going to stay for dinner um there'll be an official photograph and and he sort of leaves the house saying you know I'll you don't call me I'll call you but the calls don't come um and meanwhile and meanwhile people that they knew or knew just in terms of like the butcher you know the white butcher uh start drifting uh drifting away um and life looks a little more difficult and um aimless politically for them than than they'd ever expected um so that when eventually the husband the lawyer husband gets a call from a neighbouring country um white minority ruled uh from a from someone in in in that country who says come and join our law firm there's there's great liberal work to be done here over the border uh where your where your where your work will be appreciated they decide to leave um and so they pack things up and uh and they say farewell to 21 years of existence in a single house and that's where the story ends great um did you want to uh have anything there Claire before I ask something I might add a tiny thing which is that they're threaded throughout there there are a couple of their other relations um one is the um Muchanga who's the who is the man that they employ to take care of the house yeah um and it actually ends with him um at the very end so they because they have set him up to be a a sort of merchant or a pair of a sort of merchant or a peddler I guess they've got him a cart and some um a hawker's license a hand cart and stocks of small commodities and and um he's he's somebody who's been having trouble adjusting to this new um the new situation he was at first afraid to go into town but he seems to have sort of um got used to things but they are aware um as they leave him that that he may not prosper that that the difficulty of getting um restocking his wares will may prove um it may prove impossible and that he may he may end up with nothing um and and so he's waving them goodbye the way he always did when they went on vacation yes they're not going on vacation they're leaving for good yeah it really is it really is I think a it seemed to me almost a perfect story a perfect way of how to do this kind of whatever this kind of thing is I don't I think it's pretty suede generous but but this kind of nameless you know characters who are the white characters not named and a nameless an unnamed country um you know of a way of doing this allegorical and yet densely realistic story at the same time I think it's just perfect because every clan mentioned um mochanga the the the the the housekeeper and servant I mean the the and gardener he is too the the way in which he uses every single detail for instance the the wife likes to um look after her tropical plants um and early on in this story as she's telling her husband about this experience that she had in the square with the with the embrace from the two two soldiers she's described as um wiping little green fly off the leaves with a tissue that's been soaked in in gin and then a few pages later uh when mochanga is doing exactly the same thing gordama writes they looked at mochanga he was doing something extraordinary he was using gin to kill the green fly on the on the leaves she says you can't do that gin's in great in very short supply you should use any old rubbing alcohol so it's fine for the mistress to do it but it's not okay for the servant to do it um it's it's things like that just really excellent use of every single detail claire mentioned the thing about him waving at the end as they used as he used to wave at them when they went away on holiday everything is worked out perfectly it's a beautiful structure yeah yeah I wanted to uh just to ask you about a particular thing that uh it's sort of a strange moment um it's it's on the last page of the story um when the husband the the lawyer husband is telling his wife that um their friend chipande um who's about to as you described to jim take a position in the new government and so on uh has been pleading with them not to leave um and when it became clear that he would not be able to prevent them from leaving he actually cried uh the husband reports right cried and to which the wife says I know that's what I've always liked so much about them whatever they do they feel um that that's close quote and then the next line reads the lawyer made a face there it is it happened hard to believe that's it there's no more um there's no more on on that observation that the wife uh made you know that it's a that's what they're like observation anyway I'll ask you about that and about gordon was wanting to put that there on the last page of this beautiful story yeah I I mean I I was struck by it too and in fact taking the taking the prompt of your question bob I mean I was sort of thinking earlier today maybe she didn't need to have that line right maybe maybe the maybe the story would be even stronger without it because we already get a sense there's a certain amount of liberal entitlement I think when the when the friend chipande is introduced they say he'd been a sort of protégé to them but they didn't like to use that term at smack of patronage and you think okay I think I have the idea of what these people are like perfectly decent perhaps a little self-congratulatory and but also at sea they're in over the heads in some way this is the history is is marching on ahead of them in ways that they're not able to to keep up with and maybe one didn't quite need that line but it's on the other hand it's sort of breathtakingly honest as for her as a right or daring for her to put in there's a similar moment in in mission statement where you'll remember she's making the trip with her soon to be lover to the uncle's farmhouse and they stop at a small village to get some soda and she's in the car he goes into the the shop and the car is immediately surrounded by poor kids who basically want to get a little bit of money and and from the perspective of Roberta Gordema writes something like poor children they're always the same children yes and it's just again one of those sort of daring moments where particularly by contemporary standards I think contemporary writers will probably be editing that stuff out but an honest writer sticks with the limitations of her character and isn't afraid by by the by the by the politically offensive right and I think what I think what's interesting to me about that moment is the the I mean both of those moments but the one Bob that you referred to is that I mean you do as a reader like oh right and and and and it's hard it is the wife it's the wife who says it and and it's hard not to somehow associate that character with the author in right who is who is a a privileged white liberal South African who and and yet of course I think I think Gordema would herself be outraged by any reader making that association because you know at various moments I think in the 70s she would say I despise liberals I'm a radical you know I mean and this is this is a comment on liberals you know she would distinguish herself powerfully from such a character but but but somehow with the passage of time that and and maybe with distance geographical distance also I think it becomes easier to somewhat conflate the two which makes which makes I think the the the makes it only more uncomfortable oh yeah one of my students in in my class the other day when we were doing this story in fact cited it and and was uncomfortable about it and we we then looked at the fact that Gordema had after all added the lawyer's response all right the lawyer's face there it is it happened hard to believe so I mean I would myself I mean as a reader I would be much more inclined to associate Gordema with with the husband lawyer's response but but but but I but I think that you know that that's back to the earlier conversation about her being difficult you know you actually have to pay attention you actually have to take that in and you actually have to consciously make the distinction you know make I think we live you know we live it we live in an era of of auto fiction right and there's there there's a much readier leap by a reader towards towards the autobiography or you know of the author than there was even 40 years ago you know I think it's something that that that can happen unthinkingly yeah now I agree I agree well if you don't mind I'm going to jump to to the last of the stories which is a late story called Alice from Lauren all is lost right it is for those of you who haven't read the story it's a third person story though it is rooted throughout in the consciousness or the subjectivity of a woman a certain age an academic a historian South African who regularly thinks of herself as a survivor after the recent death of her husband of many years her brief has her remembering things in the story sexual pleasure intimacies confessions previous marriages in their very early lives but also one thing her dear husband had told her about a brief homosexual affair he had had before the two of them had met decades in the past whom to talk to about that she asks herself again and again and of course you know obviously one one question we have is readers as we read this is why now do you want to to ask someone about this after decades of of marriage now that her husband is gone and so she goes to track down the other man an architect in London elderly now but still attractive when they meet she is somewhat taken aback learn that the affair had been somewhat more important than her man that's how she refers to her her husband then her man had given her to understand her sense in this visit in her encounter with the architect is that her man's lover the architect was giving her too much information and thus somehow violating the terms upon which they had agreed to speak the words nothing personal is repeated a few times nothing personal and yet she feels like she's getting something actually quite personal or at least seems so to her so she had felt that somehow their their agreement had been violated and in the end when she leaves the architect a final thought very melancholy to say the least is you know the one you knew you cannot know the other any other unless or learn things lost so that's a very very brief story so summary this is a late story as I mentioned written right after the death of nadine gordon was husband rhino casera it had been a long marriage and though her husband was a very old man when he died his passing was in every way obviously momentous for Gordimer I have two long letters from Gordimer in my files describing the sense of unbearable loss and distress she she also sent me the manuscript of this story with another letter explaining that she wanted us to to publish this story in our magazine so McGundy because she sort of felt good about placing it with people who had themselves been long married which is a sort of a strange idea in a way but just a few words about the nature of the story it is not I think clearly saturated in race or politics the way so much of Gordimer's fiction is and yet in several respects it seems to me a characteristic Gordimer story I mean again accepting that it's that it's not that granting of it's not saturated in politics and race so how characteristic in number one it's relentless interiority in its acute sort of alertness to every aspect of its mood and expression but most of all in what I'm going to call its quirks and oddities it's sort of very carefully orchestrated sentence fragments deliberate repetition of certain key words and phrases and the sense through it all that no matter how much is said there is much more that is sort of hinted at and merely implied there are even this is only the only sort of local particular I want to call attention to there are many others I sort of tempted to speak about for oddity sentence constructions and metaphors that seem wonderful and yet also maybe just a little bit I'm going to use this strange word off I felt this in Gordimer at other times but particularly at this moment in the story right up the very front of the story there is this quote the long while continues a chord that won't come full circle doesn't know how to tie a knot in resolution right seems to me a tricky construction the chord that doesn't know how to tie a knot and so you know I get the sense of the the grieving speaker plausibly reaching for language to express what at least is for her somewhat inexpressible which so that's that that's all I really just want to say just your initial beginning about this this story but where James something it's a it's a lovely story and and and what a what what a lovely thing that that she chose Salma Gundy for for such a person for a deeply personal clearly piece of fiction I was struck I said this to Claire I think yesterday when we were talking about these three stories I was struck that all three of them have to do with people stepping up to about to step up to a kind of resolution which would be joining themselves with someone else communicating with another and all of them leave move away from that situation say farewell in in two of the stories I think if this is one of them no it's the other two stories that it's almost identical line about how she didn't have that they didn't have the right words and and you could say for this story in some ways at the end too that these two people are not quite finding the right words on which to agree on which to find common ground to talk about talk about the their their mutual lover so I was just struck by that that sort of and then and then I suppose thinking about that I was wondering how generally pessimistic we should consider the line about you know the one you know and you can't know the other and maybe that's a little unfair to to go from that line to everything and you know politically racially and so on but I just don't know it may it may it start it got me thinking yeah yeah that's great I think you're right you want to jump in it all Claire there you know I just to come back to the line that you that you pointed to in this sort of strange strange metaphor that that personifies the cord I mean it's it's it's a rather it's it really is quite quite strange but but it is about as you say I mean the rest of that it's a very small paragraph is so whom to talk to speak and there's nobody you know there is this sense yeah I mean I remember years ago in my in my Shakespeare class as an undergraduate I mean I can't even remember which professor it was pulling out pulling out lines from different plays and saying in Lear it is not the worst so long as we can say this is the worst that's that's not as dark as it gets as long as you can say this is the worst that's not as dark as it gets but in Timon of Athens there's a line in Timon that I'm going to misquote but but the line is you know let me say this then let language cease yes and that that is the darkest that is the darkest that there can be is is the complete breakdown of failure as long as we have language we have something and so I think you know here there is this sense of well what is language without an interlocutor yeah what what what is it to speak if you if nobody can hear you if you're not communicating to anyone and that in some way is what the story is addressing and so that so as you say the sort of breakdown of metaphor in that respect makes makes some I mean it's not that there's no meaning there it's that that meaning isn't so accessible to us right right right well we have we have a question so many other things we we could say but I think we want to to allow invite Adam Braver to to give other people who are with us this evening to to ask questions if they have some questions to ask so Adam would you like to to do that yeah we have no questions at the moment you can type questions into the the q&a which would probably be the easiest way to go unless somebody has a very specific question you want to ask which we could call on you as well well while we're waiting for someone to to type in a question let me put a question that seems to me you know a sort of a more general question that that takes us back to some of our earlier conversation and so on I was thinking of a of a moment when in in the novel burgers daughter where the two young women who who are both the children of what are called the faithful which is to say the white people who have been fighting on behalf of the overthrow of the white apartheid government some of whom go to prison die in prison like Rosa burgers father Lionel burger and and the one young woman there in their early 20s um asks Rosa burger to do something simple um to run off some mimeograph flyers to be used in agitating for the overthrow of the government and so on and uh and Rosa burger uh refuses um she refuses she says because we are such conformists as the children of our noble faithful wonderful parents um so I mean that that passage and like so many others in Gordomers seem to me to suggest how complicated is the relationship in Gordomers work between what might be called private concerns um personal concerns psychological concerns and political commitment or conviction um you know what the other young woman says to Rosa burger at that moment is um conformists who cares you know about conformists I mean you know there's the political situation that that that we're in I mean who cares whether we're conformists or not and so anyway I thought to sort of put that out there as a way of sort of suggesting uh you know all of the different ways in which in the novels and the stories Gordomers complicates um what would otherwise seem a pretty straightforward uh political question should we or should we not um work on behalf of overthrowing this intolerable system no anyway that's church uh I don't know if you if you've felt that sort of thing in in any of the stories that we've that we've looked at I certainly think it's it's clearest in the three stories in a soldier's embrace um right yeah we're personal well I mean yeah I think I think you know this is another um another conversation um that that actually James and I were having while walking a dog um that um but but but you know they're um they're I think she's somebody who rises remarkably to a particular challenge I mean she writes about in various places and spoke I think about the fact that you know you are you are writing in your times you know you are given your subject you're given your place in history um and and it's sort of not a choice it's a thing that that that happens to you hang on I have I have here somewhere I have a quote um so she says you know it wasn't that it wasn't um she says about writing that she was a writer first and then she says it was learning to write that sent me falling falling through the surface of the South African way of life um and then she says also in the introduction to her to her selected stories um she says in a certain sense a writer is selected by his subject his subject being the consciousness of his own era how he deals with this is to me the fundament of commitment although commitment is usually understood as the reverse process a writer's selection of a subject in conformity with the rationalization of his own ideological and or political beliefs my time and place have been 20th century Africa um and so and so you know um in the context of of other uh white liberal South African writers I mean it is it is a sort of um recurring conundrum right that you that you you have the these issues um of of of race and oppression and uh and class and the terrible history and that you know you have all of these things that that in which by which you are surrounded and in which you are if you will encased right um you can't escape them and so you know it's almost um as as writers of fiction I think you know what we one tries as a writer of fiction not to put oneself um narratively in a in a situation um in a binary situation right where the where there are only two possibilities um and I think she um you know when you're dealing with these politics um in the broadest sense there are only two possibilities there's a right side and a wrong side right so so um I think part of what's remarkable about Gordimer as a writer and about Kutzia and about you know Damon Galgan about others who sort of rise above that binary as it were um or out with that binary it is finding the ways in which um if you look at the whole self and the whole soul um enmeshed and entrapped in this um inescapable situation but you you can come to see almost as if you had a microscope you can come to see the the really complex nuances and and um and oddities right of each individual experience that it it isn't simply right there's a good side and a bad side right it that may be over archingly and fundamentally true but but the realities of lived experience which is what fiction is about um are are much more are much more complex than that and and and almost everyone is in some shade of gray you know that's great um Bob we have a couple of questions here um so I'm good we have two from I'm going to combine together from two of our institute friends Sheila Caller and Liz and Liz Benedict and the questions and I'm going to try to put them together that is one is do you feel that Kutzia is more read today than Gordimer or does he also suffer from the same phenomena and the follow-up question that the related question that Liz asked is you know how do your students respond to Gordimer's work recently do you think they can appreciate it beyond the political world that she writes about and and Liz brings up uh being in that teaching burgers daughter and Iowa writer's workshop in 1993 uh where the students found it uh difficult um and and put off by it and you know do you think there's any Gordimer work that might transcend the difficulties and maybe the uh irrelevant quote-unquote difficulties um and irrelevance but also this question is you know is Kutzia in the same um place in this conversation huh that's a great question I mean um I I teach a lot of both of those writers so I do have some sense for the way students respond to them um I think you know Kutzia's work isn't um rooted in uh time and place quite in the way that Gordimer's most of Gordimer's fiction is and so in that sense my own sense is that that Kutzia is uh being taught at least in lots of places that uh we go Gordimer's novels are no longer being taught um I had numbers of colleagues who were teaching a Gordimer here uh 25 30 years ago and then that's no longer the case I'm the only one you know remaining who's doing that but Kutzia I think is very still very widely read and taught um but the difficulty uh in in in Gordimer is is considerable I think my students my students um can connect with with the Gordimer novels uh that I teach and there's one you asked is there one yes I think there's one uh that uh and that is called the pickup which is a rather a late Gordimer novel um it is not although it opens in South Africa it moves off elsewhere um in some ways it's it's a novel about globalization um and and race um and ethnicity and uh and I think students have a much easier time connecting with that than uh then with the novels focused on South African race and politics hey that's my sense of it yeah it's an interesting question the the thing about I mean you want to talk about Kutzia and Gordimer together because the two white South African writers who who dominated the last 30 years in contemporary literature and who both won the Nobel Prize um and I agree with you Bob it's my feeling that Kutzia at the moment you know if we're thinking about this as a sort of literary market you know he sees there's more of him on the shelves right um quite literally that's to say I don't know what if you go into the local bookstore what of Gordimer you're going to find but you'll find disc you'll find disgrace there um though you may only find disgrace um but I I I I think you're right that it's at the moment at least Kutzia's fortune is that he's always been formally quite various and uh intriguing so there are there are more or less realist novels or pretty realist novels like Disgrace um there are early postmodern works like in the heart of the country uh which are really dense and difficult uh self-reflexive works uh and allegorical novels like Waiting for the Barbarians and so on so it's it's there's there's a plus the the the memoir work um which is quite remarkable too so there's there's quite a lot of Kutzia to uh to handle at the moment uh in a way that is is should we say useful for him well it's it's interesting because you know it's almost as though there's too much Gordimer though I mean is isn't I mean it's it's a um she wrote a great number of of novels and a great number of stories I I mean I some this is a completely unrelated conversation but one does sometimes you know there's the Graham Green effect like what what what do you pick which which what you know and and and um it's interesting it's interesting um Bob that that the pickup is the one that you find students relate to because of course that's not considered I think one of her canonical you know I mean Berger's Berger's daughter is the is considered you know or July's people are people yeah um but and um you know there are several others that come to mind um you know in a sort of firmament of the ones that that one thinks of as defining her work and and yet um you know that isn't necessarily um with with time with time you know as we know I mean I at the moment examples are eluding me but I know that you know if we go back to the 19th century you know there are novelists there the works their particular works that were popular then that are not the ones that have that have uh endured you know over time in fact you know that some of their least popular novels have become more popular um for one reason or another so I mean it's an interesting um I but I think almost having too much to choose from um can be challenging also I agree say I mean James wrote um if I may say a very great essay about Chris says Elizabeth Costello um and and and that is a book that I teach um all the time and which students though it's very demanding work students um relate to that very very enthusiastically um and so you know it's I wouldn't have predicted that but it is the case and that would be a good example because you know Elizabeth Costello's whatever it is is a sort of meta-fictional essay that is in part about fiction and realism but also about animal rights about death there's a there's a that that you could see why there's a there's a lot to there's a lot to get into there um but Claire mentioned I mean you know we're thinking about the sort of literary marketplace Claire Claire mentioned Graham Greene I mean this is proof that that we don't even have to appeal to notions of of the stranglehold of relevance um 30 years ago 40 years ago there were Graham Greene was about as big as it got in in in certainly in English fiction but it would you probably say in worldwide fiction he was often considered a potential Nobel Prize winner um there was some ideal sweet spot that he'd hit of of you know entertainment and seriousness um uh even you didn't actually have to have read any Graham Greene to know the phrase that W. H. Orton made famous in one of his poems Graham Greenish to know that was a certain while a certain green atmosphere was and that has literally gone it's just gone it's disappeared so maybe there's just this this we I mean we shouldn't lament it too much this is just the way the way cycles of literature literature move I don't know yeah no it's true um Adam are there other questions you wanted to we've got two more questions um and I will uh we'll probably cut them off there for the sake of time and I have a closing question for for all of you as well but one I'll ask you two they're not really related but maybe you'll relate them as you think about them um one is what do we make of the fact that uh Alva Alva Lauren is a foreign phrase that in fact comes from the label of an african or wine so that's question one um and then the follow up question to that is uh in in your opinions would you say that Gordimer was more interested in preaching her radical values or rather in dramatizing the difficulties and complexities of social protest um yeah well my my I think in just on the second one because I think this first one goes to you Bob but I would just say she was pretty she was quite explicit that that her aim was the latter yeah she was repeatedly explicit that her aim was the latter yeah absolutely absolutely um I mentioned once and I say when in uh in the first interview that that uh I did with a couple of other people with with Gordimer many years ago I actually used the the expression political novelist um um uh and Gordimer bristled um and she said I am not a political novelist um and her sense was that a political novelist is by definition uh someone who has an axe to grind um someone who writes novels if they're writing novels to promote an ideology and so on uh whereas she was the other kind of writer uh she was using the novel as a way of discovering what she thought and felt about a whole variety of different things um and so we uh that was an interesting sort of moment of of public uh chastisement and correction uh you know and um of course I said I didn't I didn't mean political novelist in that in that other sense but she she was as you say Claire she was very clear that's not what she was about as a writer you know uh so oh and then the other question well the african wine I you know I think I I don't read any political any particular political uh sort of intent um there um in the label um she's bringing the wine with her to London from her own country um it's a gift and so on maybe maybe there's more should be made of that then uh then then I've made of it but I I I didn't think of that as particularly um significant in political terms but maybe you maybe you guys did I I didn't yeah is that okay yes yep so let me ask my last question and then we will um carry on with the the rest of the evening for everybody and and then is who who all of you think are the literary heirs of of um of Gordimer I mean obviously Damian Gallagher comes to mind but maybe the literary or is not necessarily even South African um and having to be thinking um in in those terms you know well Bob what were you going to say oh I wasn't I was going to ask you guys that you know well I mean I actually was thinking sort of expansively away from what you were saying earlier about you know the correction political novelist I mean you know that you didn't mean it in that way and she didn't want it to be meant in that way um but it's hard to think of any decent novelist who isn't in some way of ambition who isn't in some way also a political novelist I don't see how you would be you you mentioned earlier the thing about likening her to to gain of and I was just as you said that I was just trying to think of 19th century Russian writing you know to be to be a 19th century Russian writer was to be a political writer in one way or another Tolstoy was a political writer very much so um and um and not to the detriment of the work either um so I think I'm dodging the question really I I'm um well one writer who comes to mind might might be someone like Rachel Kushner who whose whose last novel was a quite densely researched novel about a set in a women's prison in California um and um I I don't know that that makes her the heir of Gordema but but it's certainly a good example I think Claire will think of other writers too maybe a friend of us from Germany but um there are you know one can think of writers like that who are working in a political vein because that's what needs to be done right now I was actually um as James surmised I was I was going to mention Jenny Erpenbeck um perhaps as a as as someone who uh similarly uh is is writing the stories of her place in time and uh geography you know she is she was born in what was then East Germany she is um she's in her fifties now um you know and she has written um repeatedly from in different ways from different angles about different aspects of the last uh you know well I guess the last 120 years um indeed but certainly the last 50 years and sometimes about the present you know I mean she's somebody who is um who's very much engaged in that way in in a in a in in evoking or channeling the complexities of the time you know right yeah and if if um you uh describe um speaking about the complexity of the time as political then I have to agree completely with uh you know with James and in effect with what you're saying Claire with that you know all good writers of ambition um are political writers in one degree or another uh when I every year teach your book Claire the woman upstairs that certainly raises all sorts of political questions and everyone in the room is is alert to that you know there's no there's no getting away from it um so I I think that's true I cannot think myself of of of any contemporary writer who at least in my sense of it is writing in the Gordamer vein specifically and I just can't I can't think of any um the better offer wouldn't you know but you know I I can't think of one I mean I I I yes certainly Erpenbeck isn't a writer of sim isn't similar to Gordamer as a writer it's more that just I mean and I can think of several others who who in very very different ways um but are engaged I mean I think also of another friend of ours a Colombian writer named Juan Gabriel Vasquez um and you know he's somebody who's very much engaged with with writing into or through the the world in which he finds himself as a as a you know Colombian writer and and um you know there's a lot of politics and history there um but but but stylistically there's not a resemblance at all yeah yeah I agree I agree so uh so Adam uh does that have have we uh successfully uh evaded your question yes I mean it seems there's so many different ways to know we could have a whole other conversation and a whole other hour and a half just on this although both of the names Claire that you about James and Claire were names also came to my mind too which which does you know make you think it is not necessarily an issue of style or subject but of ethos or something that that that's carried on um Bob I think we need to close the the evening um now so first of all I really want to thank Bob and Claire and James for for participating in this um and it's really been wonderful and Bob I especially appreciate Bob was very kind to open his files of correspondences and manuscripts and so on of needing Gordomers um as as um with some of our students who are working on preparing the exhibitions um as well as the pages of Selma Gundy and perhaps his conversation they very well find itself in the pages of Selma Gundy um one one might hope um and would also like to uh again as Betsy noted at the beginning uh very much express our gratitude for the donor uh who endowed this program 23 years ago Robert Blaze for for his gift which allows such rich conversations such as this to happen um annually and I will say for we hope to see you all next year at this time that the book we will be focusing on is The Street by Anne Petrie and and looking at that whichever way we find ourselves looking at it so again thanks Bob Claire James and and all thanks for all of you for attending tonight as well thank you all thank you Adam thank you Betsy thank you for good evening good evening good night