It’s the way she tells ‘em

What exactly IS a short story?

In the introduction to her ‘Selected Stories’, Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer offers a compelling definition: “whether or not it has a narrative in the external or internal sense, whether it sprawls or neatly bites its own tail, a short story is a concept that the writer can ‘hold’, fully realised, in his imagination, at one time. A novel is, by comparison, staked out, and must be taken possession of stage by stage; it is impossible to contain, all at once, the proliferation of concepts it ultimately may use”.

Both types of short story are represented in ‘Selected Stories’. Gordimer shows herself to be a master of the quick self-contained sketch, the vividly depicted moment, particularly in her earlier work. ‘The Soft Voice Of The Serpent’ is a case in point. It concerns a one-legged man confined to wheelchair identifying with a locust which has also lost a leg, and ends neatly with the man’s painful realisation that locusts can fly.

Of the sprawling variety are many of the later stories. These include ‘Friday’s Footprint’, in which woman widowed following a boat accident marries her husband’s step-brother, and belatedly and shamefully realises with horror her mistake: “it was as if something had burst inside her and was seeping up in a stain through all the layers of muscle and flesh and skin”. ‘Livingstone’s Companions’, too, unfolds gradually with a sense of narrative development, as a journalist retracing Livingstone’s last journey finds himself at a hotel he can’t leave, obsessed with the nearby lake and inexorably ending up in bed with the hotel owner Mrs Palmer.

A white South African writing during the time of Apartheid, Gordimer is inevitably particularly sensitive to issues of race, and most of the stories centre upon and explore attitudes and suspicions, depicting encounters between people of different race and status. Her skill is to dramatise social scenarios haunted by awkwardness, discomfort and misunderstanding, and as such she is perhaps even more interested in those whites opposed to Apartheid than she is in those who are openly racist.

In this respect, ‘Which New Era Would That Be?’ is exemplary, recounting the visit of a white woman, Jennifer Tetzel, to a black man’s house. Though sympathetic and benign in her intentions, she nevertheless succeeds in further stoking the resentment of those whose rights she champions: “these women felt as YOU did. They were sure of it. They thought they understood the humiliation of the black man walking the streets only by permission of a pass written out by a white person, and the guilt and swagger of the coloured man light-faced enough to slink, fugitive from his own skin, in the preserves – the cinemas, bars, libraries – marked ‘EUROPEANS ONLY’. Yes, breathless with stout sensitivity, they insisted on walking the whole teeter-totter of the colour line. There was no escaping their understanding. They even insisted on feeling the resentment YOU must feel at identifying themselves with your feelings…”.

Similarly, in ‘Abroad’ Manie Swemmer, a South African who returns to Northern Rhodesia after a long absence to discover it’s changed almost beyond recognition, professes to be open-minded and modern in his attitudes towards black Africans, but, despite being broadly well-meaning, cannot help but give occasional voice to deeply ingrained prejudices.

The advice often given to aspiring writers is: “Write about what you know”. Gordimer certainly couldn’t be accused of not doing so, but her reflections on the theme of race never become repetitious – not least because, as she reflects in the introduction, the chronological arrangement of the stories allows the reader to trace the development of her own attitudes. If, as she claims, what makes a writer is “the tension between standing apart and being fully involved”, then ‘Selected Stories’ is the work of a consummate professional.

‘The Gentle Art’ narrates a different type of encounter to ‘Which New Era Would That Be?’. A couple of holidaymakers are taken crocodile-hunting at night, and capture a baby: “she touched the creature’s cool, hard back, a horny hide of leather medallions, fresh, strange, alive; from a life unknown to the touch of humans, beneath the dark river”. Later, a larger crocodile is shot, Gordimer emphasising the uncomprehending barbarism of the act in graphic terms: “Then the pale gaze coming from the dark forehead exploded; it blew up as if from within, and where the gaze had been there was a soft pink mess of brain with the scarlet wetness of blood and the mother-of-pearl sheen of muscle”.

That the story is Gordimer’s take on the central imagery and ideas of ‘Heart Of Darkness’ becomes clear towards the story’s conclusion as the hunting party returns to camp: “The night river closed away behind them. It went back where it came from; from the world of sleep, of eternity and darkness, the place before birth, after death – all those ideas with which the flowing continuity of dark water is bound up. And the boat came back; brought them within sight of the light of the camp itself, existence itself, a fire, the reed house, the smell of food and a human figure”. This sense of a return to civilisation, a retreat from the African unknown, is itself an oblique reflection upon the issue of race.

Best of all, however, is a story in which race does not figure at all. In ‘A Company Of Laughing Faces’ a 17-year-old girl is taken to a South African seaside resort for the Christmas holidays by her mother with the hope that she might meet and have fun with other young people. Struggling to fit in, Kathy falls into companionship with a boy, and the story appears to be panning out as a beautifully written but familiar narrative of lost innocence and emergent sexuality: “She had never been caressed before, but she was not alarmed because it seemed to her such a simple gesture, like stroking a cat or dog. She and her mother were great readers of novels and she knew, of course, that there were a large number of caresses – hair, and eyes and arms and even breasts – and an immense variety of feelings that would be attached to them”.

But Kathy’s fictionally derived notions of romance and sexuality are shattered when the boy attempts to rape her. She escapes, but Gordimer’s point is made evident by the conclusion, in which, on a trip, she discovers in the water the body of a younger boy whom she has befriended. The sight is “the one real happening of the holiday, the one truth and the one beauty”; her childhood is as dead as his.

Often beautiful yet ominous, the stories collected here are descriptively rich and packed with observational insight, and encourage me to not only read more Gordimer but more short fiction in general.

(An aside: Is this sort of review pointless? On the one hand I write them partly in the hope that they might inspire someone to hunt out and read a copy of the book, but on the other they’re unlikely to do so if the review’s packed with spoilers. I’d be interested to know. It’s just difficult to review fiction without spoiling things… That’s the beauty of music criticism – you can say what you want, because no words can quite ever convey what a song or album sounds like.)