Confronting Hateful Legacies
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing CONFRONTING HATEFUL LEGACIES by pearl k. bell Nothing in Nadine Gordimer's earlier work- five admirable novels and five volumes of short stories dealing mainly with her native...
...The conservationist wants South African society to remain unchanged, and he protectively assures that the birds and reeds and grassland on his farm-initially bought on impulse, as a tax-loss deduction-are tended, nurtured, made to yield fodder, natural beauty and order, "the simple things of life that poorer men can no longer afford.' To conserve is to possess...
...The predatory Mehring has liberated his creator from the inhibiting reticence of the well-formed story, and given her the courage of a driving extravagance that, remarkably, is never excessive...
...His Leftist mistress, a self-congratulatory fountain of radical-chic cliche, has fled to London with his help, scared away by the government's interest in her dilettante fraternizing with blacks...
...Yet McGahern's exquisitely written book reminds us that the brutality and despair of much modern fiction is not the whole or the only story...
...Sex is not necessarily an existential booby-trap, and some of the promises life holds out may even, once in a while, be realized...
...The threads of heightened metaphor and carefully manipulated symbol, shuttling back and forth between the veld and the irascible introspective landscape of Mehring's solitude, pull him, urgently, resonantly, toward his doom...
...She, too, had been a teacher, and as a girl was torn between entering a convent and marrying a handsome police sergeant...
...Although Patrick's sorrowful brooding on the past is suffused with the dark inevitability of death, although Isobel's life before now has been an ominously neurotic pursuit of self-destruction, McGahern miraculously convinces us that they have indeed blessed each other with the enduring gift of a life to share...
...Still, the taproots, deep in Ireland's incorrigibly tragic experience, are the same, and so is the luminous purity of the novelists' courage...
...It is the only communion left to us now...
...The Leavetaking compels our assent-as brilliant literary art alone can do, and as soap opera cannot...
...Of German descent, Mehring is not a fanatical racist like his Boer neighbors...
...It is a country as holy and narrow, as intransigent and seductive, as the Ireland that drove Stephen Dedalus to arm himself with silence, exile and cunning...
...The father shrugs off the boy's long hair, political indignation, and fashionable rags, even his homosexuality, as the tiresome antics of childhood, soon to be outgrown...
...Driving back to Johannesburg from the farm after the floods have receded, he picks up a tart who lures him to a grove off the freeway, where her accomplices wait in ambush to kill him and pluck him clean...
...that he has reason for proclaiming, in D. H. Lawrence's words: "Look, we have come through...
...He preens when she calls him a sexual fascist...
...When it is over, he will be dismissed by the priest who manages the school for marrying an American woman outside the Church-the sin twice compounded because she is Protestant and divorced...
...McGahern's first novel, The Barracks, won an Irish literary prize...
...Yet the ideal he hoped to find among his women-"a friend and a beloved in one"-remained an elusive shadow until he met Iso-bel...
...the realities of power and oppression emerge in a new way, no longer dependent on the reassuring simplicities of condemnation...
...Armored in the impregnable security of his isolation, "accountable to no one," Mehring has found the perfect substitute for people-a 400-acre farm on the veld, a short drive from the city, that arouses in him a covetous and cherishing ardor no woman could hope to match...
...First fire, then flood, assault his precious acres like Biblical plagues...
...It is not so big a leap as it may seem from South Africa to Ireland-two smoldering countries clinging obstinately to the hateful legacies of their history-but light-years of feeling and possibility separate The Conservationist's barren rapacity from the delicate fulfillments of John McGahern's love story, The Leavetaking (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 195 pp., $6.95...
...Not quite 50, he scarcely remembers his former wife, now in New York with a new husband...
...In The Leavetaking, Patrick Moran, a Dublin schoolteacher, moves in a sleepwalk of thought through his last day on the job...
...While nature can renew itself, a green new growth in time prevailing over the ravages of fire and water, Mehring's pride of possession remains sterile...
...His 16-year-old son, conveniently away at school most of the time, only bores and puzzles him...
...McGahern's imagery, for all its haunting melancholy, is flawlessly precise...
...To be sure, she has always written with genuinely unhortatory intelligence about the harsh dislocations and indignities of apartheid, which taints every South African with its moral squalor...
...Rarely is a writer in mid-career (Miss Gordimer is 52) invaded by a character who asserts so audacious a force of discovery it is as if a key has been turned in a door the novelist didn't know was there...
...Writers & Writing CONFRONTING HATEFUL LEGACIES by pearl k. bell Nothing in Nadine Gordimer's earlier work- five admirable novels and five volumes of short stories dealing mainly with her native South Africa-prepared me for the incredible power, the intellectual and poetic authority of The Conservationist (Viking, 252 pp., $7.95...
...But he is forced to learn, finally paying for the lesson with his life, that he cannot attain absolute dominion over the South African veld, expropriated by white men yet cared for by the blacks who belong to it, just as he cannot control his coldly reckless sexuality...
...the censors banned the publication of his second, The Dark...
...All the prudent habits of imagination, judgment and language are swept away before this indomitable wave of energy, and the novelist, willing or not, is obliged to accept the challenge of transcendence...
...But this burnished eloquence derives its weight from the bitter fidelity that stamps McGahern's rendering of Ireland...
...As Patrick's mind leaps eagerly forward to the next morning, when they will take their even graver leave, of Ireland for England, he also finds himself drawn irresistibly back from his present happiness to his poor and miserable boyhood, and to the death of the young mother he adored...
...In England their marriage "will be neither a return nor a departure but a continuing...
...Like the anonymous black corpse found dumped in his pasture at the beginning of the novel, Mehring is claimed in death by the land that now possesses him...
...With unerring control, she builds a deceptively erratic structure of minutely observed natural detail, hypnotic rumination, and deftly interpolated glimpses into the black compound on the farm...
...With The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer has triumphantly left the timid league of minor novelists behind...
...A Johannesburg industrialist whose fortune was originally made in pig iron, Mehring spends his complacently successful business life hurtling first-class around the world...
...Serious novelists take a dim view of love these days, and shudder with revulsion at the threat of a happy ending...
...Such a character is Mehring, the conservationist of Miss Gordimer's ambiguously ironic title, and he is so absolute and commanding a presence-is there any other woman who can write with this shrewdly intuitive sympathy about the inner life of a man?-that he threatens to take up all the space there is...
...This vigorous, lustful, impatiently practical man of affairs has made a virtue of impersonality, cutting dispassionately through all the human ties that bind...
...The choice made by McGahern's lovers seems insignificantly private set beside Joyce's Promethean defiance in the cause of art...
...Yet The Conservationist is not simply Miss Gordimer's finest novel by far, it is a book intricately different in kind from what she has done before...
...Like Nadine Gordimer, he can fuse past and present in a dazzling stillness of thickly layered time...
...It is no small part of the novel's achievement that we can see Mehring in proper perspective, though much of the time we are trapped inside his head, eavesdropping on a clamor of memory, fantasy and sexual greed...
...A writer must convince his readers that he has truly earned the right to speak, as McGahern does at the end, in the accents of exaltation...
...Striding confidently around his land Mehring declares, "My possessions are enough for me...
...But this is hard business sense, not idealism: An absentee landlord needs his farmhands' devotion...
...These bare bones of narrative, however, only dimly convey the stunning richness and teeming density of Miss Gordimer's prose, which one can scarcely credit to the same hand that wrought the cautiously subdued style of her earlier books...
...Years after her death, her son failed her, unable "to renounce the longing to enter the mystery of the loving and living flesh of woman...
...In the unending imaginary argument he carries on with the exiled woman, Mehring sneers at her romantic faith in revolution- "The only way to shut you up is to establish the other, the only millennium, of the body...
...for a South African he is decent enough to the blacks who manage his property...
...The life she eventually chose was a cruel drudgery with a violent-tempered husband, relieved solely by her dream that Patrick would become a priest...
...ownership is power...
Vol. 58 • March 1975 • No. 7
