The Life of the Mine

Remembering Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)

Business Day, 22 July 2014.

‘Responsibility’, wrote Nadine Gordimer in one of her most important essays, ‘is what awaits outside the Eden of creativity’. As the many tributes to her over the last week have shown, this was a writer who took such responsibilities seriously. Always ready to be in the intellectual thick of it – whether involved with the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Writers during the struggle, or opposing ANC-led bills limiting public access to information toward the end of her life – Gordimer was a model citizen of the Republic of Letters if ever there was one. The move from ‘creative self-absorption’ to ‘conscionable awareness’ is the essential gesture that gives the essay its title and the oeuvre its extraordinary social and historical breadth.

But what about the second half of that sentence? What was unique, strange and private about her work? What exactly was the nature of that enclosed and fertile space – ‘the Eden of creativity’ – that made her the writer she was?

Perhaps these things are impossible to know, even (or especially) for the artist herself, who may not wish to look too carefully into the sources of her own creative gift. But what this ‘barefoot girl from Springs’ did have deep within her imagination was the landscape of the mines, both the epic scale of the physical workings below ground and the extreme social patterns produced above: a complex play of depth and surface that is never far from the language of the books themselves.

The fact that her ‘Eden’ was a small mining town on the East Rand gives an unmistakable stamp to her work. Not for her the kind of ‘I had a farm in Africa’ lyricism and nostalgia that is threaded through so much white writing from this continent. Escaping from social problems into a pristine natural world is hardly possible if the very landscape around you – with its dumps, earth tremors, shafts and sinkholes – is unavoidably the product of mass industrial labour.

From the first lines of her first novel, The Lying Days, her prose has been scoured clean of any naïve lyricism. Its opening chapter, ‘The Mine’, unfolds as a virtuoso piece of descriptive prose: a complex narrative voice weaves us through the complex social geography of Rec Club and Married Quarters, of concession stores and the Compound, from where the general manager ‘borrows’ teams of off-shift miners to tend his enormous, lush garden. As someone who also grew up on a deep-level mining town, I can remember the extraordinary scale of these Company gardens, watered with undrinkable effluent from the workings underground, spilling all the way down the slope to the golf course where that contaminated water could still be smelt on all the fairways.

Through Gordimer’s subtle and dangerous prose, we are made to see both the ‘normality’ (for the child protagonist) and also the deep strangeness and injustice of this world, a brutalist microcosm of South Africa’s socio-economic structure. Repeated all through this most autobiographical of Gordimer’s works, the phrase ‘life of the mine’ becomes a mocking echo of the more familiar ‘life of the mind’. Which is apt, given that the young Helen Shaw escapes from such narrow horizons via books in the municipal library – but a library not open to all.

Always the anti-sentimentalist, Gordimer would often discourse on the ugliness of the mines: the yellow ridged hills of sand, ‘thrown up and patted down with the unlovely precision that marked them manufactured unmistakeably as a sand castle’. But one senses too her relish at having such an un-literary subject to set her apart from all the other would-be writers sending stories to The New Yorker. And she keeps on mining that landscape throughout her career, at points finding something almost mythic within it. In ‘A South African Childhood’, she describes the worked out collieries that have caught fire underground and are still smouldering decades later: ‘Neither rain nor time could put the fires out, and in some places, even on the coldest winter days, we would be surprised to feel the veld warm beneath the soles of our shoes.’

The short introduction to On the Mines, her 1973 collaboration with David Goldblatt, is one of the best things she ever wrote. It avoids the build-up of surface details and sometimes irrecoverable ironies that can weigh down the novels. Instead it has the pared down, compressed quality of a parable or an allegory – an allegory for the cynical paradox at the heart of apartheid, which demanded migrant labour even as it insisted on superficial apartness. The essay also charts the passing of an era, as many of the deep-level mines begin to reach the limits of their profitability and close down in an unromantic, post-industrial sunset: ‘Those single unshaded bulbs which burned everywhere in the prodigality of “mine” electricity, making the mine’s own daylight in sheds and offices and fly-screened Quarters of the Property, go out – following economic decrees as apparently immutable as natural laws’. In the last paragraph, the old steel shaftheads are glimpsed as ‘totem objects of the extinct frontier society’.

Long before she encountered Marxist thought at Wits University, the mines had impressed upon Gordimer the fundamentally economic, materialist basis for human existence. This deep-seated materialism, I think, might also be why she is intrigued by conservative businessmen and captains of industry throughout her career – people who wield the same insight to different political effect – and why she writes so well about them. When she migrates from the anguished liberal protagonists of the early work into the consciousness of a wealthy industrialist and unrepentant capitalist, it produces her greatest novel, The Conservationist. Beginning as the story of an African farm, this 1974 Booker Prize winner culminates amongst blue gums and slimes-dams, in the strange wastelands left by the mines.

Do people still read Gordimer in South Africa? I don’t see much evidence of it, especially among the young people I teach. She seems (wrongly) to be associated with the past, and an unfashionable, didactic version of what ‘South African literature’ might be. To revisit her childhood topography, her suspect Eden on the East Rand, is to be reminded of what a strange and unexpected writer she was, and how powerfully she diagnosed the business-mindedness that still continues to dominate South Africa’s imagination of itself: ‘the Great Impartial’, as one character puts it in The Conservationist, ‘Development’. And as our recent history shows, from acid water drainage to the murdered workers of Marikana, the life of the mine is one that far exceeds the human span.