After Apartheid Broke Down
FALKENBERG, BETTY
After Apartheid Broke Down July's People By Nadine Gordimer Viking. 192 pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review," New York "Times Book Review" "It began," says...
...You don't have to stage yourself in some 'situation' to sell to the papers when it's over...
...Or: "I can't stand your fucking rearrangements of facts...
...Out over the suburbs...
...What unfolds in these pages is a tale of intense horror...
...It is too soon...
...Just as what may happen is incalculable, "even if apocalyptically or politically foreseen, and the identity of the vital individuals is hidden by their humble or frivolous role in an habitual set of circumstances...
...For the twentieth, the hundredth time . . . it seemed that all was quieting down again...
...We are witness in July's People to more than simply the breakdown of "civilized" mores...
...And despite everything depending on mutual trust, that very trust eventually reveals its manipulative base and collapses...
...Why the bakkie, the "second" car...
...What was here, with her, was some botched imagining of his presence in circumstances outside those the marriage was contracted for...
...we can go to my home-july said it, standing in the living room where he had never sat down, as he would say 'We can buy little bit paraffin' when there was a stain to be removed from the floor...
...To the children as well she becomes a stranger...
...Her...
...Beginning with The Conservationist, moving on to Burger's Daughter, and the short story collection, A Soldier's Embrace, and culminating now in July's People, Gordimer's art has achieved and sustained a rare beauty: It is at once totally committed and human-scale...
...It was not that she thought of him with disgust-what right had she, occupying the same hut -but that she had gone there on a long trip and left him behind in the master bedroom...
...It is too late...
...Husband and wife, partners in a marriage that has been built on a complicity of insincerities, begin to battle...
...In a startling, apocalyptic tale in her last collection, entitled "A Lion on the Freeway," Gordimer creates a parable for the black dock-workers on strike: the cooped-up zoo-lion, "bending the bars of the cage...
...out on the freeway now, bewildered, finding his way, turning his splendid head at last to claim what he's never seen, the country where he's king...
...The normal framework of living itself is removed, and the fabric of human kinship erodes...
...In fact, in his quiet insidiousness and controlled contempt, July is a more ominous presence than was the Baasie of Burger'.s.Dawgfer (Rosa Burger's black childhood companion whose delayed vituperations cause her to vomit in her London hotel room...
...Because, as Gordimer observes, "the wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital...
...The usual strikes, riots and civil unrest, followed by the"arrival of a plane load of white mercenaries...
...For Bam, the same distancing process goes on...
...But one time, soon, it will not "quieten" down...
...he did not know to whom to speak these days, when he spoke to her...
...Today, each new book seems to grow out of the last, enriched and annealed , as if every word she writes comes out still smarting from "the Refiner's fire...
...She runs: trusting herself with all the suppressed trust of a lifetime, alert, like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of the young, existing only for their lone survival...
...Worse, in a way, than the souring of relations between July and the Smales -since that is the expected, the historically given-is the destruction of intimate family ties...
...Of the supercilious sneers or other jarring tones that occasionally marred some of the earlier novels, not a trace remains: They have been wiped away like the grin from the mummer's mask...
...These sudden movements within her often changed her from persecutor to victim, with her husband, her children, anyone...
...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review," New York "Times Book Review" "It began," says Nadine Gordimer of the events in her new book, "prosaically weirdly...
...the master-servant relationship becomes an hourglass that keeps turning itself up-sidedown...
...But she does comprehend July's rage, and for her, too, there comes (as does for Rosa on a higher level) a "moment of truth" when July suddenlybeginsto"talkatherinhis own language": "She understood although she knew no word...
...Maureen?' 'His wife?' The daughter of the nice old fellow----The consort clients meant when they said: And we'd so much like you and your wife to come to dinner...
...The other half in collusion, one for purposes of income tax...
...On this jittery premise Gordimer projects her fiction-A very short distance, one feels?into the future, without any lurid science fiction extrapolations...
...Maureen asks...
...A new bitterness erupts between them, and when things go wrong, they try to apportion blame: "Why do you do what I want so that you'll be absolved...
...When Bam shoots two pigs for food, for example, Maureen, speaking out loud, tells him to give the bigger one to July's family, while whispering to him that the smaller one will be more tender...
...They cannot afford to relax lest they be "caught out...
...July's People aretheticmon the freeway...
...Of course Maureen Smales is no Rose...
...she is running...
...The journey is one of reversed conditions and exploded roles, where no verities obtain and only children have the inward ability to adapt...
...July, at first their gracious host, soon arrives at a point where all the years of inner smoldering surface and take their toll...
...Even her body...
...Eveninsideoneself, nothing is constant...
...So, Maureen Smales daughter of a Western Areas Gold Mines shift-boss -And Bam-Architect of the firm Smales, Caprano and Partners-drive off with July and their three small children in their little yellow "bakkie," a sporting vehicle Bam had treated himself to on his 40th birthday to use for hunting in the bush...
...July, "their frog-prince, their savior...
...Social hypocrisy serves a new purpose...
...Not 'Maureen.' Not 'his wife.' The presence in the mud hut...
...July, whose black hands smell of Lifebuoy when he balances their morning tea tray...
...You don't have to invent yourself...
...To which Bam replies: "Don't pose, Maureen...
...A dreadful straining of the bowels to deliver itself: a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying cloud of smog and anguish...
...Their communications are reduced to "decisions neither wanted to take the responsibility for without the other...
...Wrenched out of time and place, nothing works...
...So much for grace under pressure...
...Her prose has a density and sparsity that one finds in the greatest writers...
...What goes on inside the family is as irreversible as what is taking place in the country...
...Beyond anything, he despises then-pretense that they have always regarded him as an equal, and he finds ever newer and subtler ways of humiliating them...
...No, none of these...
...When the anticipated occurs, it is the Smales' loyal servant of 15 years, July, who becomes their host...
...The Smales, a white liberal couple living in Johannesburg who have joined political parties and "contact groups" to show they could spurn privileges, and who considered leaving those other times only to stay-After all, their money was locked into bank accounts-will be mistaken...
...There, in the bush, on his home ground, with the Smales totally dependent on his good will, he will defy them with gentle mockery: "You not going to pay me, this month...
...They looked to their mother but her expression was closed to them...
...Thus in the end, when a helicopter menaces the compound, "she walks out of the hut...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 13
