None to Accompany Me
By Nadine Gordimer
Farrar Straus Giroux, 324 pages, $22
In Nadine Gordimer’s profound new novel, “None To Accompany Me,” the place is South Africa (Gordimer’s native land) and the time is the early 1990s-when Nelson Mandela has been freed and the country is preparing itself for the transition to democracy. Juxtaposing the dramas of two families, the Starks and the Maqomas, who have been friends across the color bar for many years, Gordimer takes a long, keenly insightful look at the most intimate connections in her characters’ lives and, in the process, lays bare the essential solitariness of the self.
Winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, Gordimer is a dexterous, intelligent, ironic writer. In her recent works of fiction-the novel “My Son’s Story” (1990), the story collection “Jump” (1991)-she has perfected a pared-down style that is marked by swift transitions of voice, unembellished dialogue, lucid meditations and a punctuation of dashes as individual as that of Emily Dickinson.
At the heart of this new novel, so discreetly presented that at first it almost seems camouflaged, is the love affair between Vera Stark, the self-possessed deputy director of the Legal Foundation, an organization fighting population removals of blacks from their homelands, and Zeph Rapulana, the equally self-possessed squatter leader who is her ally in this struggle. Between the urban-dwelling, white-middle-class grandmother in her 60s and the middle-aged black leader from the countryside a tranquil, intuitive intimacy exists:
“Vera had never before felt-it was more than drawn to-involved in the being of a man to whom she knew no sexual pull. . . . It was as if … they belonged together as a single sex, a reconciliation of all each had experienced, he as a man, she as a woman.”
One of Gordimer’s great talents as a writer is her ability, once having established the truth of a situation, to call it into question. For example, Vera and Zeph first meet as they confront a landowner who is trying to forcibly evict a squatter settlement from his land. Seph says to the landowner, “Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.” This leads Vera to think: “The gift of the squatter leader’s tolerance, forgiveness-whichever it was-was something the farmer didn’t deserve.” Yet later, as Zeph’s assurance continues to reverberate in her mind, she realizes that his words “were not tolerance and forgiveness but a threat” to the farmer, a reminder of what the squatters might do to him if they wished.
Vera does not truly desire a home and security, and what she ultimately finds intolerable about Bennet, her husband of 45 years, is his need of her and his dependency on loving her. “I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me,” Vera explains to their daughter Annick. “When someone gives you so much power over himself he makes you a tyrant.”
Vera’s first marriage, contracted as a teenager, had ended in divorce after Bennet became her lover in the waning days of the Second World War. Bennet, who had hoped to be a sculptor, became an English professor instead, and then a businessman marketing a line of luxury luggage. When his business fails in the recession of the early 1990s, he is diminished, for he has allowed himself no purpose beyond providing for his wife. To their son Ivan, Vera confesses, “Ben made a great mistake…. He gave up everything he needed, in exchange for what he wanted. The sculpture. Even an academic career…. He put it all on me…. The whole weight of his life.”
Like Bennet Stark, Didymus Maqoma is in eclipse. An important leader in the Movement-the organized struggle against apartheid-Didymus and his wife, Sibongile, have spent years abroad in exile. Their 16-year-old daughter Mpho was born and brought up in London. After the amnesty and the Maqomas’ return to South Africa, Didymus finds himself passed over for positions of authority. As the Movement is transformed from a clandestine to a legitimate organization, Didymus has become a liability. Once judged a hero, he now runs the risk of being considered a criminal because of his role as interrogator and jailer in a camp where spies who infiltrated the Movement were imprisoned.
It is Sibongile, rather, who is sought after for her diplomatic skills and her ability to forge alliances. Kept ignorant of her husband’s activities in the past, she resists learning any more about them now, for fear of jeopardizing her political career. As husband and wife trade positions-Sibongile is sent abroad on missions, while Didymus waits for her at home-Gordimer sensitively charts the changes and tensions in their marriage.
Elevated to positions of increasing responsibility and importance, Sibongile finds herself on a hit list. And once again the marriage readjusts. Having endured such dangers in the past, Didymus can serve as Sibongile’s guide-regaining his sense of purpose as he protects his wife.
Vera, too, faces terrorism. She is shot in the leg, and a colleague dies from his wound. But compared to Sibongile, Vera is “small fry.”
About the transformation wrought in the Maqomas by the continuing threat, Gordimer is eloquent: “A terrible privilege to which Sibongile and Didymus belong changes and charges everything about them to the outsider; the sound of their voices in the most trivial remark, the very look of their clothes, the touch of their hands…. When every old distinction of privilege is defeated and abolished, there comes an aristocracy of those in danger. All feel diminished, outclassed, in their company.”
Gordimer is equally expressive about the often painful contacts between these parents and their grown and half-grown children. In a sense they are humbled by their children, who reveal them at their most vulnerable. When the daughter, Mpho, becomes pregnant, her dilemma brings out a strain of authoritarianism, even cruelty, in her parents.
As for Bennet, he cannot bear it when he realizes that his daughter Annick is a lesbian. He rejects her invention of domestic life, symbolized by her appropriation of his sculptures, the torsos he had fashioned in Vera’s image in the early years of their marriage.
For Vera, her children are a reminder of the erotic transgressions of her past. She gradually grows certain that her son Ivan is not Bennet’s child but the legacy of a last encounter with her estranged first husband. Twenty-five years later, Annick, then a schoolgirl, became the silent witness to Vera’s love affair with a young German filmmaker. Now, with reluctant tolerance and mutual incomprehension, Vera and Annick question each other’s erotic life.
But Vera’s greatest passion is for her work; her attachment to Zeph is rooted in the mission they share. Originally she had become an attorney at the Legal Foundation “not out of the white guilt people talked about, but out of a need to take up, to balance on her own two feet the time and place to which, by birth, she understood she had no choice but to belong.”
For the past 40 years, Gordimer’s fiction has reflected and illuminated her country’s troubled history and the passions of individuals with integrity and detachment. “None to Accompany Me” is a sustaining achievement, proving Gordimer once again a lucid witness to her country’s transformation and a formidable interpreter of the inner self.
