Living in Hope and History by Nadine Gordimer Page B

the establishment of apartheid, the long history of resistance against it, the victory of the organisation for the liberation of black Africans, and the release of Nelson Mandela. However, it was not a smooth progress towards liberation, freedom, and coexistence. On my way to your hotel I remembered the latest news by the foreign press of the attack on ordinary black citizens by the armed black forces, which resulted in as many as fifty deaths.
    Waiting for my melancholic face, however, was your welcoming smile. While talking with you, I was relieved by the equipoise in which your intellectual profundity, emotional richness and empirical certitude were so well balanced. Our conversation took a humorous turn.
    During our conversation I told you how impressed I was by and sympathised with the Preface to your Penguin edition of
Selected Stories
which I was reading on the underground. In your Preface you write: ‘For everything one writes is part of the whole story, so far as any individual writer attempts to build the pattern of his own perception out of chaos: the story . . . will be complete with the last sentence written before one dies or imagination atrophies.’ You also write: ‘ . . . in a certain sense a writer is “selected” by his subject—his subject being
the consciousness
of his era. How he deals with this is, to me, the fundament of commitment . . .”
    It now comes home to me too that a writer spends his lifetime continuously in writing a story which comprehends the whole of his life in its entirety. A few years ago I made up my mind to give up writing novels and more directly to comprehend my own life and the age in which I lived. By doing so I meant to try, a little prematurely, to read the whole story built up of all the words and sentences I had written.
    In a critical review of your new writing someone asked why you continue to deal with the social situations in South Africa. However, you had already answered the question with conviction. Like you I am now determined to continue to write, to the very last of the words I write, the subject selected by the age I live in, and I have resumed writing a novel.
    Your most recent novel available in Japan is
My Son’s Story
. I once discussed the opening of this novel: a leader of the liberation movement in South Africa who is ‘coloured’ and falls in love with his supporter, a white woman, who reciprocates; his wife, in the meantime, had become an active revolutionary, even before he knew about it, and was arrested. The white woman realised that she was not qualified to shed tears over the predicament of her lover’s wife, caused by the wife’s struggle for justice, because she, the white woman, had betrayed the wife by loving her husband. I emphasised that in this situation which was hard to bear she maintained her human integrity. Later I received a letter from someone who had been a student among the audience of my lecture at a women’s college and was now married, with a baby, telling me that after having read through the whole novel in translation she was now able to understand what I had then said.
    Recently in Japan a novel of ‘infidelity’ has been read so widely as to become a social phenomenon. Here, however, the theme of double suicide as the ultimate consequence of a love affair has tended to be contained in narratives of extremely narrow scope with no bearing on social situations. Very different from them is your novel which also deals with the theme of infidelity. In your
My Son’s Story
the daughter is upset when she comes to know about her father’s secret. She attempts to commit suicide. She gets over her predicament, however, and transforms herself by taking part in the liberation movement with her comrades. Her mother, too, through collaborating with her,comes to lead an entirely new life. She never flinches in the face of oppression. Further this brings about her father’s