“Writing Is How I Learn What I Don’t Know — Nadine Gordimer”

Henk Rossouw: You once wrote, “The truth isn’t always beauty but the hunger for it is.” I’m interested in how this hunger—to write and to search for truth—shapes your work.

Nadine Gordimer:
We’re always compelled to interrogate truth. For me, writing has, from the very beginning and right up to now, been a kind of expedition—an ongoing discovery of life’s mysteries. I don’t subscribe to religion; I’m an atheist. I believe this is the only life we have. Yet that singular life is astonishingly rich. Early on, I realized that we never fully know people. You believe you understand someone, yet another person who relates to them differently perceives a completely different version. Humans are faceted; endlessly so.

Rossouw: Like in “The Generation Gap,” where you wrote, “they were all other people.”

Gordimer:
Exactly. Even after all these years, I’m still travelling through that terrain of discovery—encountering things I didn’t know and then moving toward what those revelations connect to. Truth is never a monolith; it’s something you assemble from fragments—experiences, impressions, bits of knowledge. Goethe once said that you shut your eyes, dip your hand into your society, and pull out a portion of the truth. That’s the writer’s material.

Rossouw: Through which relationships—personal or societal—would you say you understand yourself?

Gordimer:
They’re constantly interacting. Your personal life—love, intimacy—sits at the core of you. Then there are friendships. And surrounding all that is the community you live within. If you’re awake to the world, you develop a sense of justice, an internal compass. Without religion telling you what’s good or bad, where does that come from? I don’t know. But it’s there. It guides you.

Rossouw: How would you want to be remembered? Through your books?

Gordimer:
Whatever is best in me, whatever has value, is in the books. Not autobiographically, but in the insights and the attempts to grasp life and reshape it in language. Words allow that—those beautiful, difficult, necessary things.

Rossouw: I’m not religious but…

Gordimer:
(Laughs) I know exactly what you mean. The same way we say “Bless you” when someone sneezes—there’s no theology in it.

Rossouw: Your words will remain for decades. Does posterity ever enter your mind?

Gordimer:
Posterity? Not at all. It’s too unknowable. Some of the writers I admire most weren’t properly recognized in their time. I recently wrote a preface to a translation of an early Flaubert book—November. I had never heard of it before; it doesn’t even appear in many lists of his works. Imagine: a brilliant little book lying forgotten for a century until a publisher decided to resurrect it.

Rossouw: And Camus’s The First Man—that manuscript found in his car after the accident…

Gordimer:
Yes. Funny enough, I recently had a room painted, and while moving a wall of books, there it was—The First Man. Such a remarkable book. Talking about it makes me want to read it again.

Rossouw: What are your thoughts on biography?

Gordimer:
Biographies often fall into what I call the “eye-spy” trap—an obsession with gossip. I have no interest in that. In serious biography, yes, you need facts—public life, relationships, joys and sorrows. But what I truly want is an examination of the work: the themes, the evolution. Increasingly, I see this in my own writing. My books vary greatly in perspective—different ages, genders, experiences—but they form one long continuous search. A single book written over a lifetime. When I look at November, I see the seeds of everything Flaubert later mastered. Writers follow their tunnels of obsession as they mature. The ones I admire all fulfilled the promise of their early glimpses.

Rossouw: So what interests you is how a writer grows—what they abandon, what they pursue relentlessly?

Gordimer:
Exactly—what they shed, and the obsessions that never let them go.

Rossouw: I’ve been reading García Márquez’s Living to Tell the Tale. He writes that “the world belonged to the poets.” Literature dominated Colombian life then. Writers met twice a day in cafés.

Gordimer:
That kind of communal literary world is foreign to us in South Africa.

Rossouw: It’s gone?

Gordimer:
There have always been different literary cultures. Here we’re solitary—scattered across a vast country. Elsewhere you had groups: Bloomsbury, Sartre’s circle, and as Márquez describes, the Colombian writers’ cafés. They shared ideas constantly. Thomas Mann, astonishingly, would gather his family every night to read aloud the pages he’d written that day. I can’t imagine that. I spent three years writing a book in this house and never discussed a word of it with my husband, Reinhold, and he never asked. I didn’t want anyone’s influence—certainly not a publisher’s. Some writers show chapters as they go along. I can’t fathom that. Reinhold was always the first reader, once the manuscript was complete. Then came his thoughtful response—questions, critiques, appreciation. I was fortunate. After that, the publisher could have it. I tell younger writers: stop showing fragments to friends. They end up wanting to write the book for you.

Rossouw: Márquez learned the same thing early. He struggled terribly—so many rejections.

Gordimer:
He’s so frail now, so ill. I saw him in Cuba a little over a year ago—such a gentle soul.

Rossouw: Is the novel the freest of forms? You once said that nonfiction carries, subconsciously, a degree of self-censorship.

Gordimer:
There’s more truth in my fiction than in my nonfiction. When I’m writing articles or speaking, some instinctive filtering happens. But in fiction, I write as though unbound. Not posthumously, not in the shadow of death, but in a state of total honesty—as though I must say everything I know.

Rossouw: As if the act carries the seriousness of speaking from beyond your life?

Gordimer:
No, nothing to do with death. I felt this even when I was young. Writing fiction is talking aloud to myself—discovering as I articulate. And every novel is new territory. You don’t learn how to write the next one from the last. Each book demands a fresh voice—sometimes distant, sometimes intimate, sometimes shifting between tenses. Our sense of time isn’t linear anymore; our minds move between past and present constantly. Do we ever truly inhabit only the present? I don’t think so.

Rossouw: No, we don’t.

Gordimer:
(Laughs) The past keeps intruding—sometimes helpfully, sometimes not.

Rossouw: Like in the story in Loot—the narrator walking through London and seeing someone from the past…

Gordimer:
Yes. And in a short story, which is such a demanding form, the personal journey intersects with history, politics, the residues of empire—in fleeting, concentrated touches. The short story is a marvelous challenge. One of the most beautiful in Telling Tales is Saramago’s “The Centaur.” A mythical creature surviving into the modern world, hiding from those who would kill or capture it. It’s deeply moving. It carries two themes: the divided nature of being half-animal, half-human; and the conflict between the mind—situated in the human half—and the bodily impulses of the animal half. Even lying down becomes a metaphor for that tension. It’s not just about a creature; it’s about hunted people, refugees, those driven from place to place. Endless migration.

Rossouw: The interview continues in VQR…