Nadine Gordimer

Tonight at 8:30 p.m. in the Loeb Drama Center a tiny, dark-haired woman will walk gracefully out in front of a University audience to deliver the fourth annual Ann Radcliffe lecture. Her bearing and quick movement have a vaguely French aura, her low-pitched, melodic voice has a clear-cut, British vibrancy--but she is a South African by birth and by choice. Her name is Nadine Gordimer, her profession is writing, and her topic will be "The Novel and the Nation--South Africa."

At 37 Miss Gordimer is one of a small number of internationally-recognized South African novelists and short-story writers. Born in Johannesburg, she has lived there all her life, taking the materials for her stories and novels from the geographical environment in which she found herself. As Miss Gordimer recalls it, she grew naturally into her profession. "I've always written," she reminisces with a smile. "At the age of nine or ten I used to write my own newspaper for my own amusement--editorials, sports, society column and all." But her interest in newspaper-writing was short-lived. "I had a fear of becoming a journalist," she recollects. "I once worked for a newspaper for five months--but I didn't like it at all."

Her interest in other forms of writing, however, has remained basic and permanent. For Miss Gordimer, the need to communicate feelings and ideas is the nucleus around which the story takes shape and substance. "You want to say something. It comes from inside. It's a terribly selfish thing. You want to express yourself. Because other people are fundamentally like you, they find it interesting."

In recent years, she has been increasingly intrigued by the intricacies of overcoming technical problems. "The theme always dictates the form for me," she stresses. Until the last ten or fifteen years her themes blended with the form most natural to her--the short story. "One person's whole life can be put into 2,000 words," she notes, "but groups of people interacting on one another won't fit into a short story. So I tried putting them in a novel." Her methods of writing differ widely in the two forms, although in most cases the finished product falls into the category of the "conventional" story or novel. "For stories I never make a note," she says, with a quick nod for emphasis, "although I might write down a name. I usually have a title and I always fight like hell if the publisher wants to change it--to me the title is the story." Often the stories come to her very slowly, accreted around a particular event. Before beginning her two published novels, however, Miss Gordimer reversed her usual procedure and wrote a long, detailed synopsis for each. Does she like writing from a synopsis? She laughs: "I enjoy making it--but living up to it is another thing."

As a native of South Africa, Miss Gordimer sees herself as a "national" novelist only through the accident of birth. "One can't help becoming involved in one's own country," she comments. In her specific case, she notes, "when you've been born color-conscious, you have to struggle out of the cocoon of this feeling. When you do--it's like being born again. The experience comes right into the heart of your work." She cautions, however, against the dangers of thinking. "'I must write about this problem.' That's the job of journalists and pro-pagandists. It's not the business of the writer at all. If you have other things to write, then you should write them."

Nevertheless, Miss Gordimer finds the basic impetus for her writing in her experiences "on the fringe of the white and black worlds--the uneasy ground where people are inclined to go past each other instead of making human contacts." She believes such contacts are vitally important. "Things can be done on the individual level to solve South Africa's problems. That's why I stay there. Even small human contacts across the color line matter very much."

Moving away from the South African situation to her objectives as an artist, Miss Gordimer sees two great subjects for the modern writer. She defines them as man trying to escape from his situation and environment, and--the other side of the coin--man trying to find his place. In the past, she has worked primarily with the latter subject, but in the future she sees herself as "being led quite logically" to the former. As she points out, "I come from a part of the world where the odds are against success."

For herself, Miss Gordimer--in non-professional life Mrs. Rein hold Cassirier--has the additional problem of coordinating marriage and career. "Constantly," she admits with disarming honesty, "I have trouble reconciling two roles which really don't go together. If you want to be a writer, it's very much happier and luckier to be a man." She qualifies her attitude, however, with the thoughtful comment that the "nervous tension" thus created "may be good for my work." The reader, finding in her stories a vividly rendered perception of the complex interplay of human relationships, may well be inclined to agree.